Rovio, a developer well-known for the extremely popular Angry Birds franchise, is cutting as many as 130 jobs in Finland, amounting to almost 16 percent of the company’s work force. Rovio’s Mikael Hed, who is stepping down from the executive position on January 1st, 2015, said it’s better to make changes sooner than later.
“We have been building our team on assumptions of faster growth than have materialized,” Rovio’s Mikael Hed said. “As a result, we announced today that we plan to simplify our organization … we also need to consider possible employee reductions.”
The app market is getting competitive day-by-day, and to be successful, developers have to come up with attractive titles. The original Angry Birds received its fair share of success, on various platforms including Microsoft’s own Windows Phone operating system. The sequels of the game followed a similar story line, but with a twist. Most follow-up titles did receive good traction from the gaming community, but it was not as high as its original title.
The company reported sales of almost $156 million Euros last year, which is way behind other popular developers like Supercell, King Entertainment, etc.
The company did release Angry Birds toys to boost their revenues, and even integrated the telepods within the games, to help gamers add different Angry Birds characters to the game. It’s still an unfortunate news for those who are let go.
Image Credit: Business Insider
