Tag: candy crush saga

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.

Analysts say that mobile gamers are looking for more than repetitive game play.

Although games like the “Candy Crush Saga” are still highly lucrative in the free-to-play mobile gaming industry, other games like “Clash of Clans” that provide gamers with a more challenging experience, are notably gaining greater popularity and becoming quite lucrative.

Supercell’s fortress defense game is currently in the lead over King Digital’s popular puzzle game.

Last year, Supercell’s “Clash of Clans” was battling neck and neck with King Digital’s “Candy Crush Saga”, to be the mobile game that would have grossed the most profits in 2013. However, so far, in 2014, “Clash of Clans” is proving to be the dominant of the two.

Analysts believe the style of game that appears to be the most successful is a good indication of which type mobile users are likely to spend money on in the future. According to the CEO of Super Data Research, Joost van Dreunen, “It’s starting to get to the point where, if nothing else, you have to have a little bit more of an enticing offering, a larger narrative and broader brand.”

The market for “Clash of Clans” and other “midcore” games like it is expanding. Many mobile gamers are looking for a mobile gaming experience that is more engaging than what causal games, such as “Candy Crush”, have to offer. This doesn’t mean that casual games will become less lucrative, but mobile developers are finding that the demand for titles that immerse users in game play are likely to boost engagement, which increases the probability of users spending more on the additional paid features that are offered for these free-to-play mobile games.

Midcore mobile games are highly lucrative in the mobile gaming industry.

Mobile games that fall into the midcore category are not as repetitious in terms of game play as puzzle games are, for example. Instead, they offer the user with more flexibility and options. For instance, they may have a storyline and characters that are customizable. In addition, it is not uncommon for role-playing and real-time strategy elements to be integrated into these games. In essence, they have certain features that immerse gamers in a similar way as “core” computer and console games do.

It is estimated by NewZoo, a video games market research firm, that of the $14.9 billion that the mobile market made in 2013, worldwide profits for midcore mobile gaming were responsible for $3.8 billion of this total. This is almost two times higher than the $2 billion in returns that was made in 2012 by these types of games.