Tag: mobile games

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.

TinyCo has settled with the Federal Trade Commission.

The San Francisco-based mobile game developer officially apologized and settled with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week, for engaging in improper marketing toward children, which violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

The size of the fine TinyCo paid for its violation was $300,000.

According to the FTC, the mobile gaming developer known for popular titles such as Tiny Village, Tiny Zoo and Tiny monsters, was marketing its games to children under the age of 13. The company was also collecting the personal identification of kids. Both of these activities are prohibited under the protection law.

According to the feds, children that played TinyCo games accumulated virtual goods, in-game currencies that allowed them to move up game levels. TinyCo permitted this to occur while it collected personal identifiers (Pls) from children 13 and younger. The company claims that the mistake was an infraction with its social identity system and also stated that it fully supports the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and the Federal Trade Commission’s effort to protect the data and privacy of kids online.

COPPA has been in effect since 2000 and the law requires online websites and services to obtain parental consent before they can collect any personal data, which includes information such as names, locations and email addresses, from users who are 13 and under.

The mobile game developer was not the only company hit with a fine.

Yelp, an online review site, was also fined by the FTC and settled charges, paying its $450,000 fine. It violated the COPPA by collecting information from users that registered and stated they were 13 or younger. Both Yelp and TinyCo have been required to delete all information that was collected from these children.

The director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, Jessica Rich, said that “As people — especially children — move more of their lives onto mobile devices, it’s important that they have the same consumer protections when they’re using an app that they have when they’re on a Web site.” Rich added that as companies develop and test their apps, they should make certain “that children’s information won’t be collected without a parent’s consent.”

With TinyCo having paid its fine, it is clear that the FTC was not bluffing when it promised to begin enforcing COPPA, especially in regard to mobile games.