Rovio Wants Everyone to Forget About Angry Birds

pcmag.com:

Developer Rovio Entertainment is best known for developing Angry Birds, but now it wants everyone to forget about that first game and start playing its other (Angry Birds) titles instead.

In a tweet yesterday, Rovio announced that Rovio Classics: Angry Birds(Opens in a new window) is set to be unlisted from the Google Play Store on Feb. 23. iPhone owners will still be able to play the game, but it won't be called Angry Birds for much longer. Rovio is renaming it "Red's First Flight(Opens in a new window)" in the App Store. If you already own the game, don't worry, you can continue to play it.

Why would Rovio kill its golden goose, the game that made the company so successful in the first place? It seems that success is now working against the company's other games, with the tweet explaining the decision to remove it from sale/rename it is "due to the game's impact on our wider games portfolio."

Rovio has released 23 games carrying the Angry Birds name, 11 TV series, and two feature films, so Angry Birds remains a very important IP for the company. However, that first game sells for $0.99 where as more recent Angry Birds titles are free-to-play and rely on microtransactions to generate revenue. It's those titles Rovio wants people playing instead, and it mentions three of them in the tweet: Angry Birds 2(Opens in a new window), Angry Birds Friends(Opens in a new window), and Angry Birds Journey(Opens in a new window).

So this news is rather depressing on two fronts. First, we are losing a classic game you could spend a dollar on to play. And second, free-to-play with microtransactions is clearly "winning" and gets us to part with more of our cash, which means we are set to see even more titles regularly urging us to keep