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posted by
janrinok
on Saturday December 06 2014, @06:25AM
from the from-angry-birds-to-angry-people dept.
from the from-angry-birds-to-angry-people dept.
Rovio has confirmed that 110 people will lose their jobs as the Angry Birds maker also shuts down its game-development studio in Tampere. The layoffs, first announced in October, amount to about 14 percent of the company's workforce.
It had been expected that Rovio would make 130 people redundant but after a round of consultations this number has now been reduced. Rovio said that as a result of the redundancies "several positions" have been opened for internal applications. The actual number of employees out of work will depend on how many new internal positions are filled.
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Rovio Lays Off 110 People as Angry Birds Hype Fades
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You will inherit millions of dollars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @06:35AM
Damnit why did the birds have to go to court ordered anger management! I knew we should have bribed that judge. And who knew anger management classes could be so effective! I thought it was all bullshit! God damn it! They ruined our business model!!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @06:37AM
Yay.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @06:39AM
Huh?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @06:42AM
Buh?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @06:44AM
Wuh?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @06:46AM
Whuzu?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @06:48AM
Habnabagapppppp
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @06:50AM
Yeah, not so much, fuckface.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @06:52AM
Baby do you hate me
Do you hate me
Baby
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @06:54AM
Suck a sack of cocks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @06:57AM
The Happy Crappy Birds love everything! Hugs for everyone!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @06:59AM
Jump over the rigid stick shove you full of horny prick.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @07:01AM
one that will neeeevvvvveeeerrrr eeeeennnnddd
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @07:08AM
Put some io.js crap in there, make yourself look hip-and-with-it.....ster.
Make sure to fork every fucking thing you can find and then pretend all your repos are original work!!! That's the way you do shit!!!!!!!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @07:12AM
peck
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @07:14AM
peck
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @07:16AM
Peck
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @07:18AM
Peck
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @07:20AM
Rovio Lays Off 110 People as Angry Birds Hype Fades
posted by janrinok on Saturday December 06, @01:25AM Printer-friendly
from the from-angry-birds-to-angry-people dept.
joshuajon writes:
From Wired:
Rovio has confirmed that 110 people will lose their jobs as the Angry Birds maker also shuts down its game-development studio in Tampere. The layoffs, first announced in October, amount to about 14 percent of the company's workforce.
It had been expected that Rovio would make 130 people redundant but after a round of consultations this number has now been reduced. Rovio said that as a result of the redundancies "several positions" have been opened for internal applications. The actual number of employees out of work will depend on how many new internal positions are filled.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday December 06 2014, @12:52PM
wired should stop copypasting from SN.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday December 06 2014, @08:45AM
Vendors of silly phone games will inevitably outlive the fad, and die. It is rather like Microsoft!
(Score: 2) by ticho on Saturday December 06 2014, @09:53AM
I wonder if they are at least working on something new, or are content to just ride the the Angry Birds gravy train into oblivion and disband.
(Score: 1) by RedGreen on Saturday December 06 2014, @07:46PM
That depends have they got the IPO under their belt yet, if so the slide to irrelevance is someones elses problem now, the gravy train has already been boarded leaving the investors/suckers at the station...
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @09:55AM
This is not a surprise. The quality of Rovio's games has gone down hill with complaints about crashes flooding their reviews. They also have changed to an ad model where the ads block play, cover the screen, or just get in your way even in the paid versions of the games. They've even issued updates requiring the user to purchase a "play all levels now" option to remove what can be day-long delays before accessing the next level. Every 'update' is just delivering another way of getting ads on the screen so a game that used to be ad-free is now just another Rovio crashing billboard.
I'll give them credit for being sneaky. They've added a "feature" to their newer games which "rewards" the player with "coins" for accomplishments and then requires these coins to unlock other levels or more powerful options. They also sell these coins and repeatedly try to get the player to "buy" the additional level or options. It's basically training users to make in-app purchases without thinking twice.
I always hate to read that people are losing their jobs, but I doubt any of the ad people will be let go. I look forward to the day the decision makers at Rovio are shown the door.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @07:45PM
I look forward to the day the CEO's and their families are eating out of trash cans and begging on the streets. But I'm not holding my breath.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday December 06 2014, @10:58AM
Nice.. Workers help employer to write a cash cow. Once task is done they can be thrown away while the owner reaps the income for years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @11:11AM
(Score: 1) by EETech1 on Sunday December 07 2014, @01:50AM
My son and I count angry birds crap as counting practice when we go to Target. We always find over 100 things. Last week when I asked him what he wanted to do, he said "I bet we could find 200 angry birds things at Target with Christmas coming"
Took us a little over an hour (including looking at every other toy too)
They sold out in every possible way
Then got candy crushed
(Score: 2) by bitshifter on Saturday December 06 2014, @06:26PM
This is not that simple.
What should the business owner do?
How much should he lose before he has to lower his expenses?
Should he wait until the business is bankrupt and all the employees lose their jobs?
I say this not as a business owner but as an employee.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday December 06 2014, @07:21PM
Profit sharing? stock options?
(Score: 2) by bitshifter on Saturday December 06 2014, @09:00PM
I don't know it they got them, or not.
Do you?
If so, enlighten us.
In the company I work for (which is a private company), when we have a very good year, we get a bonus of one months salary at the end of the year. This has happened twice in the last seven years.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Saturday December 06 2014, @11:17AM
My hobby is making a list of all the times technology companies purge workers, and then remembering that list when I hear them talk about a shortage.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @11:37AM
There's a shortage of naive workers who haven't been laid off yet and who haven't become bitter and disgruntled.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Saturday December 06 2014, @01:28PM
Angry Birds had good physics and they did a great job making it playable and fun on the mobile platform. It's hard to do, which is demonstrated by how few games become that popular against the tens of thousands of entrants out there. But then the MBAs, like locusts, are drawn to the good work of others and proceed to kill it. You get the Angry Bird stuffed animals, the Angry Bird lunch boxes, Star Wars Angry Birds (the perfect mating of two marketing whores if ever there was one), ad nauseum. You see it now with Candy Crush, which has become riven with up-sell hooks.
It would be wonderful in the 21st Century if the end-stage of these things was to put the engines in the public domain, so that new programmers can learn from the old and innovate from there to come up with new, fantastic things that increase the human bounty. This Slash-and-Burn capitalism is so 18th Century.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by hubie on Saturday December 06 2014, @02:38PM
I think this is just the natural progression of high demand products. When something gets really hot and demand dramatically rises, a company needs to expand development or production to meet that demand. They hire on staff, build factories, open retail stores, whatever. This, of course, adds to their overhead costs whereby they need to raise more money by selling more stuff, jacking up production, etc. In the 19th century a company like Budweiser had to build more breweries in order to cover their costs, but to pay for the factories they had to expand into new markets. Or take Justin Bieber (please). He must have a small army working for him to in order to keep him meeting demand. In Bieber's case the whole product is himself, and he's made enough money that he doesn't need to work another day in his life and he can just walk away and disappear. It is a little harder for a big company to do the same. I wonder how many people were working for Rovio when Angry Birds first caught fire.
In addition to the need to raise money, there of course is the desire to make money over and above what you need. I would bet in the market for "free" mobile games, because there are so many copycat games on the market, there is probably a pretty strong negative relationship between price and sales. When you expand into the merchandise business, I wonder what your profit margins are. In Rovio's case where you are riding a hot fad, I could see the plushie sales going great until it hits a sudden wall when people get saturated and think "meh." That is how I recall the Beanie Baby craze ending; just as fast as it popped up.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday December 06 2014, @05:40PM
The high demand product was ready. There was no development to be done on it. If anything, they should have put developer power into new games which then would have been ready when the Angry Birds hype ends (which was 100% expectable).
And production? We're speaking about software here. Not only that, we are speaking about software that is downloaded. So you don't even have to produce distribution media. Moreover, it is downloaded from servers other people run. So you don't even have to put work into keeping the servers running/upgrading them to handle the demand.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Saturday December 06 2014, @03:22PM
A little OT, but this is exactly why I respect Bill Watterson so much. He created what many consider the most popular daily comic strip (beating even Peanuts in many of the "top X" lists found by Google), fought for and won the right to break from the formulaic Sunday strip boxes to make them more interesting works of art... and then ended Calvin & Hobbes without ever succumbing to the intense pressure to merchandise it beyond the collection of books. No toys, no TV shows or movies.
Granted it's easier to do when you're a 1-person operation, unlike Rovio which even at the start must have had different people doing the development and the art, but it's still very rare to hear of people maintaining their personal integrity and values in the fact of huge amounts of money being shoved in their face.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday December 08 2014, @03:15PM
And I think we as a species must redesign our incentive structure to do that, to reward integrity and socially positive decisions, or we will not last.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by Gertlex on Saturday December 06 2014, @04:39PM
Was it the quality by itself that really did it? I am inclined to think it was more like FlappyBird; viral and simple.
(Score: 2) by Kilo110 on Saturday December 06 2014, @04:49PM
Out of curiosity, do you even know what is taught in an MBA program?
(Score: 2) by emg on Saturday December 06 2014, @08:17PM
As far as I can tell from how MBAs behave in the real world, it would appear to be 'how to bump up the share price so you can cash out your stock options and leave for another job before the company goes bust.'
When an MBA takes over a company built by engineers, you can be pretty sure it's on the fast train to Hell.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday December 08 2014, @03:08PM
I got my degree in Economics at the University of Chicago and took many classes at the Business School, so yes, I do know what is taught at MBA programs. More than that, I know the attitude and culture that are also taught, but not by the coursework. After I graduated I first worked in the hedge fund industry and then in banking, which constitute the acme of that MBA attitude and culture, so I have more first-hand experience with it than just in academia.
There are many from those industries and that attitude and culture who think it's butch to consign masses of people to poverty, misery, and death for a couple extra basis points of return. Most from that attitude and culture would destroy something beautiful and good without a moment's hesitation if it put another Porsche in the garage of their third home. It is an attitude and culture of profound sociopathy and dysfunction that will drown us all.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06 2014, @05:19PM
You don't think the merchandising makes them money? I think that's actually a Rovio success story.
"Angry Birds The Game" was a genuine success. "Angry Birds the merchandising" is a potential long tail that will continue bringing in money: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/28/angry-birds-rovio-revenues/ [techcrunch.com]
"Angry Birds The Game Sequel #whatever", not so much. Why pay hundreds of programmers $$$ to make games that will never sell enough to pay for their salaries? So they have to cut overheads.
Like it or not, the MBAs didn't kill "Angry Birds The Game". It had a finite lifespan and died a natural death. Just like the "draw my thing" game (which had zero merchandising potential, so the guy really got lucky he managed to get the $$$$$$ and jump off before the crash ;) ). I hardly see anyone play Angry Birds or the sequels. I see people playing Clash of Clans, some driving game, and zillions of other games.
I'm not so sure that Angry Birds The Movie is a good idea though, unless they have Pixar grade talent (in which case that could make them lots of money).
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday December 07 2014, @09:51AM
sudo mod me up