As the addictive mobile game continued to dominate the world’s mobile devices (it has been downloaded one billion times as of May) and Rovio prepared for a possible multi-billion-dollar valuation, I sat back with a smug look on my face and predicted disaster, assuming that the studio was a one-hit wonder.
In the three years since Rovio’s rise to mobile dominance began, it hasn’t developed a single game without the Angry Birds branding. Given that Angry Birds was directly inspired by the browser game Crush the Castle, it seemed Rovio was far more adept at marketing than game design.
Then, on Sept. 27, it released Bad Piggies, a vehicle-themed spinoff of Angry Birds for mobile devices and PC. It’s a cute, funny, wonderfully designed game. Bad Piggies lets players create their own flimsy vehicles piece by piece, then guide that vehicle through treacherous levels using goofy contraptions like fans, balloons and TNT.
Most importantly, it’s completely original. It stands out among the glut of physics-based puzzle games that have flooded the App Store in Angry Birds‘ wake.
With adept marketing, attractive characters and original content, Rovio is poised to become the Nintendo of the mobile world: the foremost maker of appealing, fun games designed around the strengths of the new platforms.
Copying isn’t uncommon in the videogame business. It’s hard to find a single game publisher that hasn’t been guilty of it at some point, especially when it’s just starting out.
Nintendo’s first arcade games were total rip-offs. In 1978 it released Block Fever, a bland, imaginationless clone of Atari’s Breakout. The next year it followed up with Space Fever, a shameless knock-off of Space Invaders.
But within a few short years, Nintendo was known as the industry’s innovation leader, creating revolutionary games like The Legend of Zelda.
Although it copied the concept of Crush the Castle, Rovio improved everything about it: the user interface, the art, the music, the level designs. But it was still based on someone else’s gameplay insight. Another recent Rovio game, Amazing Alex, is a previously existing iPhone game called Casey’s Contraptions that the company bought and rebranded. Good marketing, no innovation.
Just cloning, and not innovating, can be dangerous. Take Zynga (please). The Facebook gamemaker hit it big in 2009 with FarmVille (copied wholesale from Chinese farm games), bought the maker of Words With Friends (a copy of Scrabble), and is mostly in the news today for a lawsuit about an alleged game copy, mass executive evacuations and a stock price that looks like a double black diamond ski slope.
Bad Piggies makes it appear as if Rovio wants to be on a different trajectory. Sure, the characters themselves are spun off from the Angry Birds brand. But gameplay is king, and creating something that doesn’t feel like anything else on the market is the only way that the industry can sustain itself in the long term.
If Rovio continues to produce games like Bad Piggies, it can become something much greater than “the Finnish guys who made Angry Birds.” It might be the first truly powerful force in the games industry born on mobile devices.
source: wired
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