Tag: angry birds

Rovio Entertainment will be cutting up to 16 percent of staff due to lack of success.

The Finish video game developer and entertainment company that is well known for creating its smash mobile game hit, Angry Birds, will be eliminating up to 130 jobs at its home base in Espoo, Finland, located near the country’s capital Helsinki, due to a drop in profits, according to a statement made in a recent blog post by the company’s CEO Mikael Hed.

Rovio has approximately 800 employees worldwide.

The company boosted its staff and developed new games, such as Plunder Pirates and Amazing Alex after the success of Angry Birds, but its newer titles failed to be as popular. As a result, sales growth slowed and profits dropped as rival mobile games like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans earned huge mobile gaming success.

In his post, the CEO said that “We have been building our team on assumptions of faster growth than have materialized.”

Back in 2010, the Angry Birds mobile game was the top-earning app in Apple’s US store.

Aside from being the best-earning app, the game’s many versions have totaled over 2 billon downloads. Rovio’s revenue doubled in 2012, but since then it has slowed as its new titles have been unable to climb to the top of the charts.

Rovio had wanted to avoid Zynga’s fate of relying too heavily on its game FarmVille for a great deal of its revenue, by expanding beyond its Angry Birds video game franchise. It also attempted to seek the success of Candy Crush and Clash of Clans by imitating certain features of these games, such as by including in-app purchasing. The in-game purchases of these two free-to-play games encourage gamers to continue spending a small amount to accelerate their game progress, instead of a one-time payment, which was the case with the majority of the Angry Birds iterations.

The mobile game industry is believed to be a future source of growth for Finland’s economy, but Rovio’s job cuts may have dampened this hope. In August, the company announced that at the end of the year, Mikael Hed will be joining the company’s board of directors and Rovio’s current chief commercial officer will be assuming Hed’s position.

The Surface Pro is an unusual device from Microsoft that aims to bridge the gap between mobile computing and on-the-go computing. This is a device that marries a touchscreen interface and sleek proportions with a full desktop environment that allows you to run all your legacy software as you normally would. If it’s successful and if more devices like it emerge (such as the Iconia W3 – an 8” Windows 8 tablet!) then it will change the face of computing and mobile gaming forever.

When you game on the Surface Pro you’ll find that you have two main options: one being to play games from the Windows Store that are designed for a touchscreen interface and the short-bursts of gameplay that suit mobile gamers, the other being to play full PC games that can run on the device and that still work well on the move. Here we will look at the very best from each camp – install these games and you should be able to enjoy a whole new kind of mobile gaming.

1. Halo: Spartan Assault

It’s strange to me think that more fuss wasn’t made about this one: a completely new Halo designed specifically for Windows 8 to support a touchscreen input. Okay, so it’s not on a par with Halo 3 by any means, but this dual stick top-down shooter works brilliantly with thumb controls and supplies all the same atmosphere and action as the FPS games in the series. It’s a fantastic showcase for gaming on a Surface Pro or RT and really does ‘bridge the gap’ between PC games and conventional ‘mobile’ games. It’s only cheap too, so I highly recommend checking it out!

2. Super Meat Boy

Super Meat Boy is a fantastic Indie Game available on Steam that lends itself perfectly to being played on the go thanks to the short-yet-super-challenging levels. It doesn’t support touch input, but if you have the touch cover then it’s completely playable on the train or wherever else you happen to be.

3. Gravity Gun

Gravity Gun is an endless runner game, but one of the ones that features different levels rather than tedious randomly generated challenges. What makes it great though is the seriously high-octane nature of this challenge which will have your heart racing and your palms sweating. Tons of fun in a great pick-up-and-play mobile games.

4. Jetpack Joyride

Okay so this one is one of those randomly generating endless runners, but again the high speed of the game combined with the variety on offer here makes it a rare instance where that doesn’t go against it. There are plenty of challenges to keep you going, and it feels almost as though it was made to be played on the Surface on your commute.

5. Bleed

Bleed is an insanely intense indie shooter that’s once again available through Steam. This one is impossible with anything but a controller, but that doesn’t stop it being one you can play on the go – just get a receiver on Amazon and you can play on the move with your Xbox 360 controller.

There are plenty of other great games to enjoy on a Surface Pro that lend themselves to its mobile nature, including Darksiders through OnLive (which lets you use a touch screen input), Portal 2 (with the Xbox controller to show off the 3D capabilities of the Surface), Chimpact and of course Angry Birds. Check out reviews online and step into the future of mobile gaming!

Author Bio:

Jason Haddad, the author of this guest post, works as a tester for wellresearchedreviews.com. He enjoys playing mobile games in his free time. Being a fervent writer, he often shares his views and opinions on the latest mobile games that hit the market via his articles.

Please Note: Articles posted by guest writers are monitored but in no way do they reflect the opinion nor is this publication affiliated in any way with the subject or promotion of a subject.