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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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The meek shall inherit the earth -- they are too weak to refuse.
(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.