Until last Thursday, I had no faith in Rovio Entertainment, the Finnish developer behind
Angry Birds.
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
