These days, it’s hard to get much bigger than Angry Birds. The franchise’s trademark characters are arguably more recognizable than Mickey Mouse and its various spinoffs are downloaded by millions of people each day, making Rovio one of the biggest success stories of the past five years.
While it may seem like Angry Birds is growing on its own at this point, its quick rise has actually been carefully calculated. Even after one billion downloads, Rovio continues to offer free levels to fans for its original games, despite new titles continuing to be released.
IGN sat down with Rovio director of development Kalle Kaivola to talk about those free levels, plus how Angry Birds maintains its success, the future of the franchise and much more.
“It all goes back to our primary philosophy of going fans-first,” Kaivola told IGN. “We put a tremendous amount of effort into reaching out to our fans and listening to them. New levels are something that constantly come out. Whatever we do, it’s always ‘oh, that’s great, but can we have some more levels?’ We’re glad to work on those titles. We’ve tried to freshen them up in as many ways as possible. It’s something that keeps people engaged with the brand.”
"We’re open-minded about monetization in the sense that we don’t want to rule out any new ways of doing things," he continued. "However, our philosophy behind that is that the fans come first. That’s why we do test the waters, to see how our audience reacts to whatever it is we’re doing. This year we’re looking into various ways of monetizing. Last year we launched the Facebook game, which is free-to-play in that sense. You don’t pay up front. On the other end of the spectrum we did a console version, which was sort of a collector’s edition. Spruced-up graphics and all that. That’s a different thing. You pay once and that’s it. We want to keep on exploring that. We don’t want to tie ourselves to a single monetization model or a single platform. We care about the fans and the brand, and we want to explore all the avenues for them. We have a ton of different products and we want to reach out and see what people want."
Instead of just shipping a game, we want to do big entertainment launches. That’s part of our vision of transforming from a game company to an entertainment company.
Giving people what they want doesn’t seem to be a problem, as Rovio sold more than 50 million copies of Angry Birds Space last year and continues to see millions of downloads for its previous titles.
“In December we had a record of 263 million monthly active users, which is tremendous for us, but it’s all because people are playing the old games with the new games,” Kaivola explained. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s a huge amount of work to update these titles. We’ve had to work on a lot of things at the same time. We have to gear up our organization to be able to handle the giant bandwidth required to make all these updates to all these games on all these platforms that we support. At the same time, these are smaller individual teams that work on this. We have to think big when we do a launch. The mind shift there, being able to work in both of those worlds, is something we take as a huge challenge for ourselves. Instead of just shipping a game, we want to do big entertainment launches. That’s part of our vision of transforming from a game company to an entertainment company. Instead of launching a game, we want to do a giant entertainment launch, like the space station thing. That’s a huge ambition for us. We want to retain both of these worlds.”
Beyond the lucrative merchandising agreements it’s secured, Rovio has managed to release two massively successful games based on licensing partnerships in the form of Angry Birds Rio and last year’s Angry Birds Star Wars. According to Kaivola, the studio is interested in doing more moving forward. “The fit has to be really good,” he said. “Both with Rio and Star Wars, the IPs meshed so well. We’ve gone through a lot of options within the last couple of years. These were things where we felt that, from the first concept art, ‘yeah, let’s do this.’”
Regarding other brand extensions, we certainly have an open mind. That’s something we will experiment with.
Following the successful launch of Bad Piggies, Kaivola says the studio is also interested in exploring its options for further spinoffs. “Bad Piggies is something we’re really happy with, the way that that launched,” he said. “I don’t have any numbers to give out, but we’re hugely satisfied. It did really well at launch. We’re going behind that big-time this year. That’s going to be huge. Regarding other brand extensions, we certainly have an open mind. That’s something we will experiment with.”
Still, despite its success, not all of Rovio’s decisions have been met with positive reception. Last year, Rovio branched out to consoles with the release of Angry Birds Trilogy. While the game went on to sell more than a million copies worldwide, it initially stirred up controversy for its $40 price point since it contained three games that originally cost less than $3 each. We asked Kaivola to discuss that price point, and he explained that it began with the decision to remake the games rather than port them.
“With Trilogy, the way the project started was that we did a quick and dirty port to just have it up and running on a PlayStation 3. I was sitting at my desk. Our IT department had brought me this 50-inch screen and I was staring at the red bird. It was the size of my head. I knew it wasn’t going to happen that way,” Kaivola recalls. “We had a different idea of what was going to be the end product at that point, but I realized that it couldn’t just be a port. It was going to be a proper game project. With a sinking feeling I called the guys and I said ‘yeah, do you have more people you can put on the team?’ We were working with two different developers for the game. That’s the point where we started inventing. What would the product be and what kinds of things could we do with it?”
Our main focus is Angry Birds. That is our main thing. But we’re going to explore more cool things, as you would expect of an entertainment company.
“First off we realized that on a small screen, we can get away with murder regarding the graphics. Things that were huge advantages in Angry Birds, the very simple shapes and colors, turned out to be problematic on a big screen. No surprise there, but I just didn’t realize how bad it would look until we were faced with the direct port. That’s when we realized that we needed to redo all the graphics. We needed to bring all the different areas to life. We needed to add a lot of visual effects. On the audio front, we got in touch with Ari Pulkkinen. He made the original Angry Birds. We told him ‘we need to do the sounds all over. Do them in 5.1 surround.’ That was the start of it. Then we were playing around with it using the controller. We realized that it would be really useful for our audience to have Kinect and Move support. Honing the controls over time, that proved to be really tricky. We had a couple of misadventures there until we got it right. Once we did, we were very happy with where we were, but certainly that was a significant effort for us.”
“Then we took a look at the original Angry Birds classic cutscenes that we had. Those just looked so bad on a television. We couldn’t very well just go and delete them, because this was a collector’s edition. That was the mentality. We can’t just omit stuff from the game like that. So we went to talk to our animation department. ‘I realize you may have other things right now. However, there’s this tiny thing of redoing all the cutscenes from the original.’ That was a significant project on its own. We wanted to have a lot of concept art and things like that in this collector’s edition, which was surprisingly hard to find.”
Looking ahead, Kaivola believes Rovio can continue to focus on Angry Birds while expanding to explore new opportunities.
We set insanely high targets for ourselves. Things that we feel are ridiculous when we set them.
“Our main focus is Angry Birds. That is our main thing. But we’re going to explore more cool things, as you would expect of an entertainment company,” he said. “Because we’re growing so fast, we continually have to re-evaluate our structure and our strategy. I sometimes feel like we’re living in this weird condensed time. So many things happen in a day that my work day feels like it would have been a week at my previous employer. We have to be brutally honest with ourselves, look in the mirror and say ‘how did this go? Let’s be honest.’ Because all of us are in that spot in the company, that allows us to remain very honest about where we are and where we’re going. That’s something that’s hugely satisfying. It’s terrifying and refreshing at the same time.”
“The thing is, we set insanely high targets for ourselves,” he concluded. “Things that we feel are ridiculous when we set them. So far we’ve been able to achieve them. We keep going down that route. We set the targets to be where we know, right now, that we have no way of reaching them. Then we just have to figure out a way.”
Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following @garfep on Twitter or garfep on IGN.
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