The de-listing of a popular Angry Birds game from the Google Play Store last month could be reversed - or repeated on iOS. That's according to a senior executive at publisher Rovio, speaking to Axios.
The recent radical steps taken by Rovio regarding 2022's Rovio Classics: Angry Birds have been misunderstood, says the publisher, and are not indicative of profitable free-to-play games clipping the wings of a popular paid game.
Rovio Classics: Angry Birds
Rovio launched Rovio Classics: Angry Birds in March 2022, but announced in late February of this year that it would be removing the game from the Google Play Store and renaming it on iOS to Red's First Flight.
In justification, Rovio accused the classic version of the game of "impacting our entire game portfolio." Fans criticized the move, believing that Rovio Classic, which only hit the market last year after years of popularity, was simply being abandoned due to its popularity.
Search problem among users
Rovio, on the other hand, believes that it was forced to take action because the introduction of the classic game at the beginning of last year caused a search problem that led to fewer downloads of any Angry Birds games. Rovio assumes that mobile users who have been searching for Angry Birds since the launch of Rovio Classics: Angry Birds see the classic game dominating search results, decide against purchasing, and then don't download anything.
No success with other solutions
The company says it still doesn't know if the latest measures, which essentially aim to reduce search results for the classic game, represent the necessary solution.
"We've spent the last, no matter how many, ten or eleven months trying to solve this problem," says Ben Mattes, Head of Angry Birds Strategy at Rovio.
Prior to delisting, the company had already renamed the game to Rovio Classics: AB and tried to remove the term "Angry Birds" from the game's metadata, but Rovio still couldn't revive downloads for its Angry Birds portfolio, Mattes says. The failure of these attempted solutions forced the company to "do something more drastic to prove its hypothesis," he says.
What does the future hold?
If the renaming test works on iOS, the game could return as Red's First Flight on Android, Mattes says.
