@pointless
You got me thinking about Rovio in general and their more-recent penchant for creating player-vs-player areas in their games…
Other than newer games where they had arena-based play at rollout (or very soon thereafter, like Angry Birds 2), I think it all started with Go! They added the face-off racing, which felt like a natural addition to a racing game. No new content, really, just implement a leaderboard and head-to-head matchups.
And that has been the trend, even with very, very old games. They added the Arena to Epic, Master League to the original Angry Birds (which I don’t mind so much in its newer incarnation), and even added Cake Race to Bad Piggies. Of course, at that point they also add some sort of coins or crates to a game to make people buy more stuff to be “competitive”.
Then, in Go!, they even went so far as to make a sequel simply be a reset for everything.
It seems very clear that instead of generating actual game content, Rovio is going to continue to create new games or simply tack on some sort of leaderboard-based content to existing games they decide not to scuttle. At this point I honestly believe there will never be an Epic 2. It’s much easier (and cheaper) to just raise power limits and perform tiny rebalancings and then let player-vs-player drive the sales. Ads help too, I am sure, but it is the stores that bring in real revenue, I’d wager. I wonder if once they go public (have they already) if their filings will break out what revenue comes from where…
As long as enough sheep spend real cash to “win” at these entirely fabricated contests (yes, I know every game is fabricated, but Rovio’s leaderboards are a fabrication within a fabrication), Rovio has no reason to change their course of action. And they aren’t the only game maker doing that. Heck, very few game makers aren’t, at this point.
Thanks,
sutekh137
