Angry Birds is dead, kind of. Rovio announced today that the game will be delisted on the Android store on February 23, and will be renamed to 'Red's First Flight' on iOS. It was like when the grandmother of a not so close friend dies. I'm sad, but not really, and you get the sense that maybe it was due. We have a major problem with game preservation in general, and it's worse in mobile, but it's the way in which Angry Birds has been killed off that has managed to make me angry about a mobile game I have not played in half a decade.Angry Birds is a piece of gaming history. It is the most famous mobile game ever to live. It might face challengers like Candy Crush today, Flappy Bird from its sheer meme value, or Snake from Ye Olden Days, but I would argue that in terms of its ubiquity with mobile gaming, Angry Birds has them all beat. Not to mention it has multiple spin-offs, tie-ins, and two whole movies (three if you count Rio). It's because of these spin-offs that I find myself, in the year of our Billie Lourd 2023, caring about Angry Birds again.Part of it is the preservation, but the game will remain on all phones that have it downloaded, iOS is only getting a name change, and it's not a tiny game lost to history - we all know Angry Birds and hundreds of people will have the game files and code stored for safe-keeping. Most of it is Rovio's wording though, which is deliberately vague until you piece it all together, at which point it becomes arrogantly bare-faced.
Rovio is shutting the game down "due to its impact on the wider portfolio". At first, my charitable explanation was that it might take more of a strain to update such an old game for new software - I know my grandparents have had issues with older iPads no longer allowing them to run certain games or video players. But then I figured that seemed unlikely - Angry Birds is still popular, these updates will be minimal when the rest of the catalogue gets them too, and it's not like a live-service title on PC or console where the studio needs to support expensive servers.Also, the kicker is it's still on iOS. Changing the name doesn't make the updates any cheaper, so that's out the window. This is where that word "impact" comes into it. Angry Birds, somehow, is harming the rest of the catalogue. By changing the name, people will no longer see it when they search 'Angry Birds'. They will instead see the sequel, and this is why the delisting has annoyed me.
I mentioned Candy Crush before, and King's mobile hit is very typical of modern mobile gaming. It has obnoxious advertisements, cooldown timers you can pay to skip, endlessly repeated levels that keep you hooked on nothingness, and microtransactions out the cloaca. Angry Birds predates all that, and so even ♊if you wedge in an ad here or there, the game isn't built for modern mobile money-grubbery. The sequels are, but who'd play them when the world famous original is right there and is free of these irritants? The solution then is to get rid of the original and push people towards the money makers.In the Rovio Discord () a dev named Buck repeats the claim that Angry Birds is "negatively impacting" other games, and that "if these games do not improve and grow, the entire outlook of the company changes", ending with the particularly patronising statement "I'm sure that's not something you'd want". Unfortunately for Buck, this fails to expand on the statement at all.
Is it negatively impacting these games because you're spending too much time maintaining it, and i🏅n which case how will that change when it's still on iOS? Is this negative impact because too many people are playing it, and not the new ones, in which case how do you justify shutting down one of your most popular games? Is it because it makes other games look worse, leading to bad reviews, in which case how does removing Angry Birds from the equation help the games users don't like? Or does Rovio just want us to move on to a similar game that makes more money per player per minute by offering a worse experience?
I don't expect an answer to these questions. Too few people will care about a mobile title being shuttered and Rovio's vague statement is all we're🌌 likely to get. But if you think mobile games aren't 'real games', know that this doesn't stop here. It appears to be a corporation shutting down a popular game to funnel players to a worse one that's better at extracting cash via adverts and microtransactions. Angry Birds is part of mobile gaming history, but if this sets a precedent, it could be part of the entire medium's ꧅future.