@sal9
“How do you expect Rovio to pay it’s employees? The game is Free.”
That’s the point, isn’t it? Why would we pay for a game that’s full of bugs and where gameplay can be arbitrarily changed by the developer at a whim?
Let me put it to you another way: knowing what you know now, if this game required you to pay an upfront fee in order to download it, would you?
Let’s do some math, shall we?
http://www.trademob.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Mobile_Ad_Formats_Explained_2013Nov.pdf
“On average, cost per view (CPV) ranges between $0.03-$0.06 for incentivized videos”
Say I watch an average of ten videos a day (definitely on the low end, but it avoids overstating things). And say we take the low end of the CPV range, so $0.03 / view.
That’s $0.30/user/day, or $109.50 annually.
When was the last time you paid $100+ for a game, back in the days when games came in boxes? Probably never? And at least with those games: they were reasonably bug free, the games were completed, and there was a full documentation package included so we didn’t have to guess about the gameplay. In the case of ABT, Rovio is batting 0 for 3 by the criteria I just named.
There’s really no other effective way of letting them know our displeasure. At least with a pay-to-download model if an app sucks then no one will download it.
Let’s do some more math:
As of today, ABT has been rated 900,331 times on Google Play (I can’t find the stat on actual downloads, so let’s use the number of user ratings as a proxy for number of downloads – although as we know, not everyone who downloads a game will actually rate it, so the number of downloads is probably much higher).
If we assume that 10% of ABT downloads actually convert into players, plus throw in the number of iOS players (based on OS market share, let’s say there are 1/10 as many players on iOS devices as there are Android devices) we’re talking about 100,000 ABT players.
100,000 x $109.50 = $10,950,000
Not bad for a game that’s full of bugs and isn’t complete and most players have to guess (or come to the Forum) to figure out how to play it.
And that’s not counting the folks who are actually paying hard cash for the premium currency (i.e. gems).
An acquaintance of mine, who works at one of the big game app developers, once told me that ~10% of the player base accounts for ~80% of an app’s revenues through sales of premium currency and in-game items.
So if 20% of revenues = $10,950,000 then we’re talking total revenues of $54,750,000.
How many employees does Rovio currently have? After the layoffs announced last fall, probably about 700?
That’s a pretty healthy $78,000 in gross revenue per employee.
The nice thing about a video boycott is that it’s potentially enough to send a clear and unambiguous message to Rovio without killing them off
EDIT: according to Google Play (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rovio.angrybirdstransformers&hl=en) the game has been installed on Android devices between 10 million and 50 million times (that stat is located at the very bottom of the page).
Assuming the low end of that range, let’s redo my earlier math:
10,000,000 installs x 10% become active players x $109.50 / player / year = $109,500,000 – and that’s not counting iOS players and cash purchases of premium currency.
Oh, and I totally forgot about Jenga!
And they can’t give us a bug-free product???
P.S. OK, I’m willing to entertain the suggestion that I might be wrong – so let’s say that the “conversion rate” from downloads to active players is only 1/10th of my estimate – i.e. 1%. That’s still going to generate a ton of revenue for these guys.
