Rovio delists original Angry Birds from PlayStore because it's still too popular | Hacker News Reader

Rovio delists original Angry Birds from PlayStore because it's still too popular

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193 pointsxvinci247 comments

It's almost as if when given the choice people prefer games without microtransactions, even if they're older and have fewer features/powerups etc.

I would be just happy to pay for new, interesting and challenging, levels for Angry Birds "the thing" 1.0.

But, when the gameplay is so absurdly easy you can beat everything with one finger, all the levels are pointless, and most of screen real estate is dedicated to selling you gems or ability to resume playing level after losing it, it just does not make any sense. You have to seriously be mentally retarded to play it.

I was really upset with Angry Birds 2 introducing a degree of randomness into the levels. Level 6 might appear different for you, just a little bit, every time you load it.

Just like that, any appearance of craft that went into the levels was shredded and they just feel AI-generated rather than a natural progression. In which case, because AI-generation is basically infinite, do I really care to beat all the levels? (Angry Birds 1 was a big game - 700 levels. Angry Birds 2? 3,080! But it still feels like they could just increase an integer in the code somewhere and get another 1,000.)

I remember playing Angry Birds with friends (not AB Friends) back in ~2012. It was so great when you knew or had figured out the best solution to a level and your friends didn't know how, or vice versa. Also, old Angry Birds was like 10 chapters of ~45 levels each, so if you were stuck in one chapter, you worked on another (and could maybe have the solution for one chapter while your buddy had another), rather than a straight-through "oh, I don't remember how to beat level 308." Randomized levels and the straight-through progression shreds that.

Storing a seed would fix this. Procedural generation was something that made replay great for games like Diablo.

>But, when the gameplay is so absurdly easy you can beat everything with one finger

I haven't played Angry Birds since just after it came out, but couldn't you always beat everything with one finger? The entire control scheme was you dragged a little bird and let go, what would you use the second finger for?

You can play chess and go with one finger...

Go requires at least two fingers. That is what makes it more challenging than chess.

I mean, sure, when given the choice, most people prefer "free" to "costs money".

Just to point out, the game isn't free.

I really, really wish everyone would stop abusing the word "free" in that way. "Free" means "without cost", but money is only one form of cost -- so not charging money does not automatically make the game "free".

I won't play any iOS game with either ads or with a "free but micro-transaction model." If you look in the pay up front category on the app store, there are very very few games. It's too bad.

I think we should really call out Apple and Google for mismanagement here. Imagine if there was the option to play a game for an hour as a free trial, and then buy the game instead of having to plunk down $4.99 sight-unseen - or having your game in the Free category with the microtransaction shovelware around it.

If I'm the developer who wants users to have any semblance of try-before-you-buy, the free category (with an IAP for "Premium") is the only option. Which is a real shame.

Games could still do this (via a single one-time "microtransaction"), and some do this. But standard microtransactions are stupidly profitable, enough to tempt most devs.

And, frankly, the gaming industry at large has proven that paying up front does not prevent microtransactions. Even in mobile games.

But the pool has been poisoned already. If I see that an app uses microtransactions, I won't install that app -- so I'd never even know that the microtransaction was to purchase the game outright.

I get that. But you can preview what micro transactions are offered prior to purchasing, which is progress.

Is that an Apple thing? I don't remember seeing anything like that in the android Play Store. That would be useful.

I thought it was both stores, but yes, I'm referring to the Apple app store.

I just checked. I don't see anything like this in the Play Store, sadly.

They don't even need to do much, just add a category for developers who want to have a free + single-IAP-to-unlock-the-whole-thing version, and let people search that category specifically. No need for Apple to enforce time limits or anything. The trouble now isn't that demos can't exist, but that it's hard to tell which IAP-bearing apps are just full version unlocks and which are whale-chasing bullshit.

For that matter, just segregating games with any "consumable" IAP from those without would probably help a lot.

It still wouldn’t help. There is nothing stopping a developer from releasing a free game with a single in app purchase that unlocks everything.

I always wondered why Apple can't implement something similar to Steam refunds.

Quote from https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds:

You can request a refund for nearly any purchase on Steam—for any reason. Maybe your PC doesn't meet the hardware requirements; maybe you bought a game by mistake; maybe you played the title for an hour and just didn't like it.

It doesn't matter. Valve will, upon request via help.steampowered.com, issue a refund for any reason, if the request is made within the required return period, and, in the case of games, if the title has been played for less than two hours.

For all their faults (Steam is glorified DRM), the people at Valve seem to actually understand gamers and have gaming in their own blood. Apple has never understood gaming and I doubt they ever will.

I mean, even Google has a policy like this (with a tighter time limit).

It's not a well-supported/advertised path, but you can always download a pay-for game for an hour and then get a refund if you don't like it.

Google at least used to do automatic refunds if you uninstalled a pay-for app very quickly - I once had that happen with a utility app that I used to convert some stuff - since it worked exactly like I wanted, I re-purchased and left it installed for a few days.

Mismanagement? Do you realize some people spend tens of thousands of dollars a month on in-game micro transactions? Yes I do mean individual people. These people are basically the entire revenue stream for the Play Store. Of course they're not going to discourage that business model.

On a less discouraging note, there is a "try now" button in the Play store that games can implement. You can upload a lightweight version of the game for people to play without installing / paying for the game.

The "Top Paid" category isn't really the whole story, since there's no official "free demo" system in the app store. Instead, games are set up as a "free + microtransactions" and then the only in app purchase is "buy the whole game." But unless you look closely down at the bottom of the store page, you can't distinguish games like this from the microtransaction trash.

PinOut comes to mind as an example, I'm sure there are many others: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pinout/id1108417718

  In-App Purchases
  PinOut Premium $2.99

I'm sure there are app devs that use this to offer a "free demo", but I suspect the bulk of them use it because IAPs aren't subject to Family Sharing the way that paid apps are.

Google and Apple aggressively push developers to use IAPs rather than up-front paid games, and often won't feature games & apps costing more than 99c. They incentivized the current market.

I think the demo/trial model is still very reasonable. You get to download the game for free and play a level or two and then you need to purchase the full game to continue.

Of course the problem is that it's sometimes a bit hard to tell apart games like this from the P2W micro-transaction shovelware junk

On the app store page for the game, you can see all of the in-app purchases available. If there's only one for the full game, you're safe. If there's a bunch of different coin/whatever purchases available, stay away.

I'm right up there with you.

I will admit that paying like $15 four years ago for Stardew Valley on iOS felt a bit weird, but $15 is pretty cheap considering that it's the full game. It doesn't make you buy gems every twenty minutes, or watch an ad every time you plant six crops, or spam your friend to share your status for some extra gold.

It's a full game, and you pay a nominally-high-but-ultimately-reasonable price for it.

Similarly, The Binding of Isaac is also a pretty good iOS game. I don't remember how much I paid, but it was slightly higher than average, but it doesn't spam me with any microtransaction crap.

$15 is a screaming deal for a game like Stardew Valley.

Yeah, honestly, for the amount of content you get in that game, it's insane. That's not even taking into account the fact that it still gets free updates.

It's definitely my go-to recommendation when people ask about good iOS games.

I imagine that a lot of people would retroactively pay $100 (i.e. future-you would be able to easily convince past-you that paying $100 is worth it).

I wonder what mechanisms exist for capitalizing on that retroactive price. You can obviously make the up-front price higher, but this obviously erects a barrier to people experiencing the retroactive value.

Some other ones that come to mind: paid DLC, "remastered" versions released N years later (Skyrim has famously done this. I think I've paid for 3 or 4 $60 versions of Skyrim at this point), and open "tip" jars / patreon style support. Any other ideas?

In regards to Stardew Valley specifically, I ended up purchasing it on multiple other platforms after I bought it on iPhone.

I had a startup that made games in the pay up front model (with variants, like having a free episode and then selling more episodes, or demo + paid version, etc...)

It just doesn't work, people don't want to buy stuff when on mobile, they just don't. The price made no difference in sales either, could be high, low, 99c, whatever, people just ignore your game and get only the free versions.

On Android this is even worse than iOS, my startup could had SOME sales on iOS, on Android we had millions of downloads and literally zero sales.

The fact that most apps are ad-based is what drove me away from the app store entirely on Android. It's impossible to tell what's actually free, and it's hard to find honest apps that you can just pay for instead of dealing with ads or microtransactions.

So I would never have seen your app. I was already driven out of the "ecosystem". I wonder how many others are like me -- fully willing to pay, but so disgusted by the app scene that we aren't even there anymore.

Apple Arcade provides a ton of value in this regard. No ads, no micro transactions, games like they used to be.

Funny enough given this article, they have Angry Birds 1 remastered.

It’s the only games I’ll let my six year old play on her iPad. It’s disgusting to me that her first experiences playing games would be one’s trying to get her to buy stuff or watch ads.

I have no affiliation, but Zoombinis is a nice kids logic game throwback. They have released an IOS port for a few bucks.

Tell me about it. I'm an iOS engineer at FAANG, but I've been shipping my own apps since 2011. It's depressing that there's no longer a market for paid, high quality, ad-free, fully packaged apps and games. I actually interned at a mobile games studio for a summer and it was made clear to me what the profit model was: pander solely to the whales, ignore the free users.

Something like 70% of our revenue came from 2% of our users. Super bleak and helped contribute to my realization that there's just not reliable money to be made as a solo iOS dev anymore. Better to collect a paycheck building someone else's app.

>It's depressing that there's no longer a market for paid, high quality, ad-free, fully packaged apps and games.

I can't tell you how crazy it is on Android, to find a killer app that does something that's exactly what I'm looking for and to see perhaps it has or is a paid version, usually for just a few bucks, and I to go-to the store page and see some ridiculously small number under downloads. People will put up with a lot of cruft for free. Even worse in terms of apps and games is that younger people I know don't bat an eye at most it whether it be ads or IAPs. A younger guy I talk tech with will happily pay to win in games he plays, or expensive cosmetics, and he doesn't consider it at all. It's just how things are and he enjoys it. Sometimes I tactfully ask, where is the game if you just buy X or Y? And I don't think he quite gets what I'm hinting at and he's one of the most tech savvy zoomers I know.

Is that the only conclusion? There's a subset of users who are hungry for high quality applications and games. They will happily pay for substantial extensions and content upgrades. They will remember your name and see anything you release as worth considering. It's a smaller market of course but a sustainable one.

In terms of video games. I'm personally not a mobile gamer though. Maybe it's quite a bit different from desktop and console.

>There's a subset of users who are hungry for high quality applications and games. They will happily pay for substantial extensions and content upgrades.

Can you point to someone having this sort of success based on this model in the mobile space?

I have no idea how financially successful they are but the game Dawncaster is great and seems to be faring well.

$5 up front, $5 for each expansion (currently 2) which add a substantial amount of content each.

The devs are active, patching regularly, and planning another content update this year. They just released a free new mode to the game as well.

No ads, no microtransactions just a fun and complete game with lots of replay value - I hope they can sustain it over time

For mobile gaming there might be some creators here or there scratching out a living like that but probably about 0.1% as many as you imagine, or as there seemingly should be considering how much money is in the ecosystem. The vast majority of that money is sucked up by big IP and older established apps and pseudo publishers/install networks that rip off the latest trends and blast them to their audience full of ads etc. Apple Arcade was trying to create a healthier walled garden within App Store but years later feels kind of like a big brand bargain bin the way it's been run. It's just very extreme winner takes all dynamics.

I actually think there is a function of whales, not yet explored. Dont try to milk them with items. Make them gatekeepers. They get to decide who plays the game, who gets to enter, and who gets to stay. Sounds strange, but if they keep the thing afloat, they might aswell have a total say on that.

Wow ... That sounds like a massive power trip.

obnoxious pay to win items in garbage pvp games definitely cater to this

What advantage would that have to anyone? That sounds bad for both the developers and the players

   > There's a subset of users who are hungry for high quality applications and games.

You're right on, here, and it points to a few problems and opportunities. I'm that subset of users yet I have an incredibly hard time finding apps meeting my criteria in the app stores. They are there. I often find them right after purchasing something that isn't as good or using one of a hundred free-but-varying-degrees-of-awful apps because I don't trust that spending even $3.00 isn't going to get me a paid-but-varying-degrees-of-awful app[0].

The amount of awful going on in the space of "mobile development" long passed unacceptable to me. The idea that McDonald's is $10.00 or $4.50 if I use their app that crashes, needs my location, sends me random empty notifications and every other minor and major brand's app that wants to slurp up any little bit of data they can and make my notification tray useless. I'm not happy with the "check this box and we'll track everything you do but 'trust us'" cloud-enabling Windows and every app being non-functional without an internet connection and the "functionality provided" often being "license validation" and/or "share this! social network features and data mining"... takes a breath yeah, that got away from me ... but it's just nuts.

[0] The reviews which mix in the mess of one-stars from "a bad release" among the five-star "some of which were clearly paid for" just leave one wanting to take up drinking.

Can't believe this is the story with iOS as well. I thought Apple fared better as compared to Android when it came to paid apps.

Very similar story with iOS as well. Adware and InApp is the standard.

One way around it is Arcade, which has lots of quality games with no ads nor in apps.

you're not an engineer at one of the A's (Apple) if you're shipping your own apps — the employment agreement restricts it.

Those agreements aren't permitted in many countries, where OP might be at.

He can have a Spouse or son that can manage/have the finance side of things -edit: Or husband, whatever be

That's so sad.

I had this pain with my kids a few months ago while "looking to kill some time" in the Android world. I don't play a lot of phone games and was dismayed at the crap that was out there.

I like to introduce the kids to more low-fidelity games -- I started with 2048 -- I want to say probably 5-10 different choices; all I was looking for was "lets me buy away the ads", works offline (one choice was a webview to a URL which was not cached, several were very low quality) and has a small number of features that I like (and mostly sacrificed).

I ended up buying mobile version of The Kittens Game[0]. $2.99, minimally updated[1], and worth every penny. The pollution in the market as it were, I would have spent $9.99 for it.

Your comment kind of got me thinking, though. While searching, I used a "mental sorting method" (after I found a game matching my requirements) best summarized as "price, descending" because -- in a hurry -- I equated price with quality and assumed "a more expensive game in this category is not going to have ads/be a scam." In some spaces (slot machine/casino games), I wouldn't touch an app that wasn't "upfront payment only/no ads/no tokens" or "free without ads"[2], yet would happily pay for any that worked anything like the old Xbox Texas Hold'em (without voice/any casino-style game).

[0] https://kittensgame.com/web/ (I'm sorry for those who have yet to be exposed).

[1] So my kids got hooked which meant I went down that rabbit hole, again. I'm not sure when the last update was, but many bugs mentioned in the Wiki aren't present in the mobile game.

Try FDroid instead of Play Store. FDroid has a clean version of 2048. And Shattered Pixel is pretty good too; a well polished touch-based graphical roguelike, free on FDroid without any ads or IAPs.

Kids love Super Tux Kart!

strangely happy that I grew up with Solitaire

every platform has a free version (hidden beneath the ad-ware ones)

The Netflix Games you can get for being a subscriber are decent quality with no ads. I imagine that will get cut at some point unless they've got a way to measure how much this benefits their subscription numbers.

The Amazon Underground thing they used to incentivize their app store was pretty great also, the "Actually Free" games let you unlock everything in the App. That was discontinued in 2019.

It's interesting how much more effective advertising is than word-of-mouth. Maybe its because I'm not an "active gamer", but it's been hard to find honest recommendations for good paid games by small developers. Trying to research through the Play Store is very difficult though not completely impossible. The store credits from "Google Rewards" certainly lubricate the process of trying things out.

My assumption at first was that netflix would be crappy. Haven't looked at wm since they started appearing, but just the other day saw that Devolver is making games for netflix now. Pair that with seeing recent positive feedback, it made me second guess my wrongly held assumption

I'm guessing it's not a bad platform?

Netflix has been licensing some top indie games for their offering. Some of them are a cut above decent. Just Kentucky Route Zero, Immortality, Spiritfarer and Into the Breach would be worth the subscription by themselves.

The App Store and Play Store are full of ad free and micro transactions free good ports of popular PC games if you are ready to pay the price. Some are strictly targeting the iPad but others can be played on a phone. I have spent an insane amount of time playing Slay The Spire on mine. They are not really put forward by Apple and Google however.

Lots of great games on Apple arcade. All add free and microtransaction free. Pay to rent but pretty low cost, and lots of them are not available on any other platform.

Android is in the same situation.

That's because games where you pay once get dropped so far down in downloads compared to "free" ones. I've had people tell me to my face "your ($1) game costs too much" while sipping their daily $5 latte.

luckily there are still good quality games that can fill in some downtime / waiting.

Highly recommend "Slay the Spire", "Dead Cells" and any of Trese Brothers games. Of the free games "Vampire Survivors" is really good and not intrusive with ads (I think it's some kind of altruistic business model).

Apple Arcade is great for that reason.

No ads, no micro transactions, very high quality games.

I played Star Trek: Legends on Apple Arcade and it was deeply weird. It was a game that was clearly designed for a microtransaction model, with loot boxes, "rare" items, multiple in-game currencies and timers, etc - and in the Apple Arcade edition, exactly zero ways to spend money on any of it. Like a Chuck E Cheese with all the ticket machines set to free play.

There are a couple games like that, they didn’t quite make the transition away from F2P smooth as others.

On the other hand, kinda nice too, provides an interesting perspective.

I mean, that's why they are taking it away, isn't it?

solution: don't give people that choice... this aligns all corporate-business incentives which are the only ones that matter when considering how to run stores.

I'm really worried since it occurred to me that going forwards the only way to really change what any computer device does/can do is through app stores. No more programming languages; specially not 'open ones' for your own computer hygiene (or safety).

heck, at this moment I'm worried about a future (I hope it stays a future plan forever) agendas against teaching people to read and write. Now that computers can engage in verbal (oral) communication is just a matter of time.

You say that now, but you'll love the Speakwrites. You can just talk into them and they'll write for you, with realtime correction of grammar and misinformation.

what worries me is that it'll realtime correct what I say into what I mean so perfectly that I won't be able to learn to do it on my own.

Once our capacity to 'self-correct' (which is the essence of healing) becomes unused we will begin to lose it.

I guess in such a world we all talk to our personal 'computers' and they communicate us to other humans translating everything automatically. sounds like we will be so free that we won't have to learn to talk to others, 'our' computers will do that for us, and so on until we don't know whether we are ourselves or our computers are us; perfectly assimilating us into the borg.

we will have accomplished a more perfected state of "freedom": we will have become free from having to be alive!!

Yeah but they make more money on the microtransactions in the end.

They can't compete with what they once were, so they bury the past. I suspect many industries are like this. If classic movies were played alongside new Hollywood releases, the new movies would probably be choked out. Accordingly, Disney will even restrict the availability of their old movies on DVD. They can't stand competing with their former great selves.

Yea.

Google actively forgets everything in order to encourage new content and paying customers.

Not to mention, many products hit their peak of usability, and then the publishers go ahead and make it a little worse each year just so some product person can look like they did something.

With movies, I find it to be the opposite. I might recognize the old movies as better in many ways, but their pacing is excruciatingly slow compared to modern movies. It takes a layer of appreciation to get through many of them.

There is definitely an element of conditioning here. People have grown accustomed to frenetic action and the studios like it because it’s easier than hiring good writers – especially since they’re hoping for global sales and humor, subtly, and nuance are hard to translate – but that’s a learned preference based on what dominates the market. If different things came back on the market people would get used to them, too.

Older movies are full of filler too, but it's generally less exciting filler - looooong shots of a car driving through the countryside or plot beats that could be 1 minute stretching to 10 without having any reason to be as long as they are. Over time movies have learned to cut a lot of fat.

It's about conveying atmosphere and mood, not conveying plot-points as rapidly as possible.

Same reason a book might spend two pages describing a lazy dog laying on a porch swatting flies with his tail, instead of cutting straight to who said/did what.

OK, so movies have gotten better at setting the mood without derailing the story's momentum.

A lot of great modern movies have pacing similar to those older ones you don't like. It's not that they "leveled up" into some new form and obsoleted what came before—the other sorts of pacing remain entirely valid and in heavy use.

I'm not saying no one uses long shots or takes anymore and they aren't totally ineffective - I just watched Mandy over the weekend and it has plenty and they are used effectively but it's also a move that seems to have people regarding it in extremes - it's really a love or hate because of the choices they make.

But what I'm trying to say is there are other tools in the toolbox now - I haven't heard anyone say that Everything Everywhere All At Once was bad, it's a great movie, absolutely full of deliberately chosen mood, and it never has to resort to extremely long shots that take the wind out of the story's sails.

Ah, OK—I may not have followed what you meant re: pacing in older movies, then.

I can think of a lot of older movies I'd not touch the pacing on. I don't think it'd improve the film. Then again, I admit I've bounced off a couple because of extremely-flat cinematography and slow-as-molasses pacing (the original Oceans Eleven comes to mind—I don't drop many movies that I start, but I'm not sure I even made it to the 20 minute mark on that one).

Maybe I'm misjudging what you mean by "old"—I'd kinda assumed you meant "before digital editing", say, 80s and earlier. I don't think films from the '70s tend to feel terribly different from modern ones (we've developed new and more-chaotic ways to assemble very bad action scenes, but that aside, not much different) for example, but would grant that it's probably possible to divide cinema into silent/middle/modern period as far as the feel or what's asked of the viewer, and that the former two do feel pretty different from modern films—but I'd say we were already transitioning out of "middle" and into "modern" in the '60s, so you've got to go pretty old to get into what I'd judge to be notably different.

Now, film films do tend to look very different from modern movies, even as recently as the 90s, but that's because easy digital color grading hadn't ruined the artform yet. :-)

> (the original Oceans Eleven comes to mind—I don't drop many movies that I start, but I'm not sure I even made it to the 20 minute mark on that one).

Some movies were just never very good in the first place, I'd put the original Oceans Eleven in that category. On the other hand, compare the original The Italian Job to the remake. The remake has faster 'modern' editing but it's definitely a much worse movie than the (excellent) original.

> it's really a love or hate because of the choices they make.

Isn't that true of all movies?

I don't think so - see my other example of EEAAO - it's not polarizing, I've never talked to someone who didn't like it.

I understand what you're saying - choices make it either loved or hated, but most movies don't have choices that split people that extremely.

I strongly disagree, I don't think movies have gotten better in any regard except for the cost of special effects (cheaper than ever before, and so, used more often and generally with less thought and care.)

I guess it would behoove this stance to put some sort of limit on the span here - are you saying that first movie of the horse running is equally effective as the latest A24 art-house horror flick, because I doubt it, so I'd like some bounds on these sort of statements that movies have not improved?

Also, keep in mind survivorship bias - we largely ONLY think of the great movies from the 50's and 60's but have plenty of bad examples of modern cinema to easily draw from.

I have gotten more enjoyment out of watching some silent-era movies than modern release movies. Particularly, the 1916 20,000 Leagues is great. In general I don't think there is any real relationship between the age of a movie and the quality of a movie; quality movies are more or less evenly distributed through time. Sometimes film makers strike gold through some fortunate coincidence of inspiration, talent and luck, and most of the time they don't. And yes, that means most old movies aren't good; but most new movies aren't good either.

The passage of time doesn't play a role, because even though individual directors/actors get more experience with age, they also age out of the industry and get replaced with new guys. And besides, it is very often the case that movies get worse as a director ages. Compare The Godfather to anything Francis Ford Coppola has made in the past 30 years. Or Michael Mann's Thief and Manhunter to anything he's done in the past 20. Or Ridley Scott's filmography. There are many examples like this; experience counts for something but old men often lose their edge.

I very much disagree with this.

This is strongly contradicted by how frigging long movies have gotten. Old action movies are often in the 90-120 minute range. New action movies - that are supposedly lacking that old filler - are often 3 hour slogs.

Based upon this analysis movies haven't actually gotten longer:

https://towardsdatascience.com/are-new-movies-longer-than-th...

But here again we're looking at Marvel movies and saying that's the entirety of what's being offered in cinema's these days. It's not, but it feels like it.

In the mid 00s or so I would have said that movies were getting shorter. If anything, movies are getting longer again.

But there is no general relationship, direct or inverse, between the length of a movie and the quality of a movie. Some movies should be short and some movies should be long. It really depends on the movie in question.

The opposite, really: they’re relying on non-stop action and familiar franchises to keep viewers from thinking about how thin the setting is or noticing the holes in the world building.

I feel like most of the arguments against modern cinema can be boiled down to "I don't like the new superhero movies". There's worlds of modern entertainment out there that's not created by Marvel or staring the Rock.

> Over time movies have learned to cut a lot of fat.

Sometimes those scenes are fat. Poorly made movies are certainly not just a modern phenomenon.

But sometimes it's critical that those scenes are as they are.

I'm not saying it's true 100% of the time, but I've noticed that older movies tend to have more fat and when they do it's more egregious.

Throughout this discussion I've realized that this whole conversation is fraught with survivorship bias - we imagine generic marvel movies or the fast and the furious stuff when we think of modern movies, but when we think of the past we really only consider the classics. We haven't yet seen what modern movies will qualify as classic.

That is a really good point.

The 80/20 rule holds here: 80% of everything is crap. That applies to movies now, and it also applies to movies in the past.

There's also the very real thing of changing tastes. Movies are made to appeal to the taste of audiences in the time they're made. Modern tastes are different than the tastes of yesteryear.

I think it's not right to say that modern tastes are better or worse than older ones. They're just different -- but it makes sense that the ones aimed at different tastes will be a less popular.

> especially since they’re hoping for global sales

On top of that, a lot of actually interesting content has the potential to cause shitstorms. Like, especially anything LGBT and women's rights won't fly in China, Russia, Arabia and lots of Asian countries. Black lead actors lead to massive shitstorms from the far-right in the USA and parts of Europe [1] - and so, producers leave all that "potentially troubling for sales" content out.

Everything "mainstream" is just the same bullshit now, white- and dumbwashed.

[1] Black Panther and the 3rd Star Wars trilogy were surrounded by some of the most vile harassment campaigns I've seen, for example

> [1] Black Panther and the 3rd Star Wars trilogy were surrounded by some of the most vile harassment campaigns I've seen, for example

Or, movie studios have exaggerated the impact of (real, but not very numerous) internet trolls to protect their own egos from valid criticisms. The third Star Wars trilogy was an incoherent mess. And for reasons I still don't understand, the end of Black Panther was released in a rough half-rendered state. But the people making these films don't want to hear criticism of their baby, so online critics get dehumanized as "trolls". Rare instances of real trolling from the likes of 4chan get highlighted and blown out of proportion as a defense mechanism.

I agree that the SW trilogy was a mess, but that does not excuse Black actors being blasted with n-bombs and other slurs on Twitter and other social media, nor does it excuse the amount of sexist comments against Daisy Ridley.

For BP, it was the same. The whine from the far-right about "who wants to see <N-word>s in movies", "we're being ethnically replaced", "this is our future" etc. was unacceptable.

> but that does not excuse Black actors being blasted with n-bombs and other slurs on Twitter and other social media,

I'm not denying, much less excusing that. What I am saying is that such trolls are an irrelevant minority who's voices are amplified by those to whom nutjobs are a convenient excuse for their own failures.

Black Panther sold many millions of tickets in America, and had maybe a few thousand 4chan-style trolls complaining about it. Am I really expected to believe those few thousand trolls were the reason the movie got less than flawless glowing reviews from critics, rather than flaws in the movie itself being to blame? And if the Star Wars trilogy failed to perform as Disney expected, it certainly wasn't the fault of trolls. Star Wars fans outnumber trolls a million to one. If the Star Wars trilogy under-performed, it was because the Star Wars trilogy was flawed. Trolls are just a convenient excuse for the people involved in the production who don't want to face the facts about the quality of their product.

For the targets of hate campaigns, even a few thousand nutjobs on the Internet is way more than enough to ruin their quality of life. People have been driven to suicide because of that.

The worst thing are the stalkers that don't leave it at comments on Twitter but cross into real world intimidation (e.g. invasive photos, ordering pizzas, ...) to outright violence - you never know when they are gonna hit.

That's very unfortunate for the individual victims, but it cannot explain the under-performance of the targeted movies.

Thanks for expanding that idea - completely agree, and this doesn’t need anyone at the studio to be a villain, it’s just standard corporate paperclip maximization at work.

That only speaks of how severely the attention span of the average person has plummeted in recent decades. It's impossible to sit through a movie without enough dopamine-inducing distractions or MTV-style jump cuts every few seconds.

Definitely disagree with this take. I'd argue that all it means is that filmmakers have learned to make more exciting films. Cinema is a young art form and hasn't even been around for 200 year, it's no surprise to me that the movies of today are fundamentally different and more engaging than movies from last century.

They are more dumb tho, scripts and dialogues are so much simple. They rarely give you the feeling of once a lifetime seeing experience. Most of them have too much CGI and sometimes not even looking rea at all.

Sorry, but you are just generalizing based on the top blockbuster movies. Films have never been more diverse in their style and quality and, in my opinion, offer something for everyone.

If you are looking for movies that focus on strong dialogue and character work those movies are still being made and are fantastic.

But they all seem to be locked up in streaming services and the like.

Mind if I pick your brain? I enjoy compelling era pieces, though some fantasy or sci-fi is also great. I dislike identity politics and infantilizing exposition. By contrast I enjoy subtle metaphor and stories with nuance.

My favorite films would include Das Boot, I Claudius, and Seventeen Moments of Spring. For something more contemporary, I also enjoyed The Expanse. Any recommendations? Films or series in any language are okay.

Trumbo, Lincoln, Let The Right One In (Swedish). Raised by Wolves (tv).

Great! I'll look into these.

In terms of recent releases, Banshees of Inisherin was the first thing that sprung to mind.

more exciting != better

> filmmakers have learned to make more exciting films

Filmmakers have learned how to optimize for a very specific kind of "excitement", but I disagree that movies are more exciting now than they used to be.

The most exciting and engaging movies I can think of are all pretty old.

There's a fun little fact most don't know. The typical meme is that modern movies suck, but they're being made that way to pander to "the masses." But the numbers don't support this! When you see headlines like record breaking sales, it's measured in gross revenue. When you actually look at tickets sold, movies have been dying for decades. Here are the data (US only): https://www.the-numbers.com/market/

Peak movies in terms of both tickets sold and total real revenue was 2002. Everything since then has been a rapid decline, paired with lots of inflation and ticket prices going up even faster than inflation. I'd also add that those data don't consider another aspect. Since 2002 the US population has increased by more than 45 million. Seeing ticket sales plummet alongside this is especially telling!

So, while you may personally find what passes for a movie now a days as "more engaging", even "the masses" would beg to differ!

> The typical meme is that modern movies suck, but they're being made that way to pander to "the masses." But the numbers don't support this! When you see headlines like record breaking sales, it's measured in gross revenue. When you actually look at tickets sold, movies have been dying for decades.

Alternative read: the industry is dying so they double down on pandering in an ultimately futile attempt to bail out the sinking ship.

Consider anime: It has been a dying art ever since Japan's economic stagnation/recession in the early 90s. So the anime industry (generally, with some exceptions) turned hard into pandering to their most base fans, lonely dudes. Lots of waifu characters designed to sell body pillows and trash like that. This hasn't improved quality and sales continue to slump, but they're still trying.

Oddly, the rate of change seems to be a fairly consistent rate of change at around 3 frames per shot per year since 1930[1], with changes like MTV, the reduction of the role of the studio in the 60s and more creative freedom having not much change in the overall rate. Non-English films have also for some reason only had a 40% decrease in shot lengths over the same period. My hunch is that video literacy has increased as people are exposed to video with faster cuts than their parents, and we'll reach a bottom eventually. A rough comparison can be made to the word count of NYT best seller books steadily decreasing.[2]

[1]http://cutting.psych.cornell.edu/pubs/cutting&candanProj15.p...

[2]https://wordsrated.com/bestselling-books-have-never-been-sho...

Your post has it all in just two sentences: Maximum cynicism, "kids these days", "movies these days", randomly bringing up MTV, whinging about attention span, bringing up dopamine.

Really .. can you at least try to not be so cynical about the present? Everybody's walking around with a star trek device in their pocket that has all of the world's knowledge, can remote call anyone on earth, and can translate any language into any other.

Oh yes, and some movies suck. I bet if you look at the past few years of releases you'll find some you like, too.

you’re right, we are living in an era of incredible technology, and there are still plenty of good films nowadays, but you’re arguing with an imaginary figure you’ve invented. pretty much all they said was that attention spans are shorter nowadays - observably true - and that modern films cater to that - which the profit motive ensures

that isn’t “maximum cynicism” or “whinging” or even an attack on modern life

why are you jumping to such an argumentative posture? is this a debate you’ve had elsewhere that infuriated you?

Obligatory counterexample, comedies. A quickfire screwball classic like "His Girl Friday" has lots of smart lines per minute where recent Hollywood ones will have two jokes in 90mins that they've had to put into the trailer, and slow build ups so that everybody can get the lame joke.

Movies probably not. But I wonder what would happen if a band like the Beatles ever showed up again. Would they suck the air out of the room? Would they get trapped on a five year tour after two albums? Would they get ignored?

You mean Taylor Swift?

Taylor Swift has actually grown on me

It's not really my kind of music, but huge respect for her. She's obviously got tons of talent and has figured out how to turn it into big $$$$.

You make it sound as if Beyonce, Drake, Taylor Swift and Bieber don't already account for 80% of Spotify's artist payouts.

This seems to be happening with many works of fiction. They can't compete so they remake or redo things with modern audiences sensibilities. These usually fail because people liked those works of fiction for their historical sensibilities.

Even Roald Dahl is having his works censored and rewritten.

I believe its due to reaching "Peak Content".

Not so much peak content as minimum friction.

If things are more localized, you can build up more momentum as a home team kind of competitor and gain skills.

If you have to compete on an even playing field with everybody else in the world from the word go, it wildly distorts things and produces really weird results. It's still optimized, but it's optimized for a mass audience that is SO huge, and applies more pressure on anything that doesn't comply.

That's what the Angry Birds thing is like. The original has to compete on the grounds of 'produce more money', not just proliferate. As such it's cannibalizing stuff that produces more money.

When you are competing with your own greatest hits, I think that exemplifies "peak content". People have so much content, they don't even need or want new things from your. They are satisfied, and have enough.

In all honesty, that's nothing new. Remakes and the like have been the bane of movies from very early on. It still sucks, though.

But it does make movie selection a little easier -- if it's a remake, there's a 90% chance that it's going to be terrible.

Welcome to the USA; everything just gets cheaper (in quality), shinier, and more extractive.

> Accordingly, Disney will even restrict the availability of their old movies on DVD.

I don't know if this applies to Disney given they just launched a massive streaming service containing almost all of their back catalogue.

In that case, they're selling a subscription instead of selling movies, no? (I haven't used it, I don't know the details of how it works.)

What is this service you speak of? Disney+ only has a tiny fraction of their back catalog. (For instance, it is missing all of miramax)

They are referring to films created by Walt Disney Animation Studios. Also Miramax is owned by Paramount - so that would explain why it's missing.

I don't think Disney can quite be put in the same breath. (disclaimer: shareholder, though not in any grandiose quantities) I always imagine Disney as basically 3 apparatuses:

1. A squeaky-clean princess printing machine that reliably churns out 50 billion dolla- I mean, a new Disney Princess franchise every 5-10 years. No expense is spared on making the movie a lavishly animated, voiced, scripted, and instantly treasured addition to any childhood. (Because they know every dollar there will throw off a thousand in merchandising and Disney World tickets)

2. Weird creative stuff. Pixar is in this bucket, imo. Soul and Inside Out and such were amazing, amazing movies but they're obviously not going to put merchandise on the shelves. But they still sell out theaters and help build (maintain) brand prestige.

3. An oracle-tier legal/financial arm that is essentially independent of 1 and 2 that just views itself as having a giant stack of copyrights and money and it needs to turn it into more money.

So while (imo, this is subjective obviously) I think 1 and 2 are roughly as good as they ever were (and remember that Disney almost died multiple times due to not actually being very good for decade long stretches), 3 doesn't care about that and if some tactic with DVD supply or whatever will help juice sales, they'll do it because it's their job.

Disney gets a lot of flack, and rightly so! They're a big reason why copyright in the US is so fucked up, and I do hate them for that. But at the same time, I think they honestly do contribute more to artistry and enduring culture in the West than lots of other companies with even-worse legal departments do.

> But at the same time, I think they honestly do contribute more to artistry and enduring culture in the West than lots of other companies with even-worse legal departments do.

Counterpoint: they saturate the market with so many MCU, Star Wars and other high-profile (Avatar!) content that it is all but impossible for anyone else to get enough people into cinemas or onto streaming.

Like, people only have so much money and time to set aside for entertainment, cinema is one hell of an expense as it is [1] and now, when alone the MCU pumps out four movies a year, there is no budget left for anyone but them. Streaming? The same. There's an insane amount of high quality content on Disney+, and they got all the "cool and popular" stuff.

On top of that, Disney's treatment of, say, VFX studios is fucking up the market there as well: the more market share Disney has on the client side, the less choice studios and other suppliers have. Either they accept the sometimes disgusting behavior from Disney (especially ridiculous deadlines) or they don't have other clients and shut down.

Between the Mouse just gobbling up everything they can, Netflix pushing for a washed-down uniform standard [2] and small cinemas closing down left and right, entertainment is in for dark, dark times. Disney needs to be broken up and since the movie industry didn't get the hint from the music industry that rightsholders should take care of offering access to multiple streaming services, government has to mandate that as well. The lack of competition hurts everyone.

[1] a typical MCU movie for two people will be anything from 50-100$, including tickets, 3D surcharge, long-duration surcharge, popcorn, soda, parking/public transport

[2] https://www.vice.com/de/article/ake3j5/warum-sieht-beim-netf...

> entertainment is in for dark, dark times

Sadly, I share this pessimism. It's why I've started collecting DVDs of movies that I know I'll want to see again. Mostly used, because so many aren't even available on disc anymore.

I see the day coming when these movies will simply be unavailable to me, and so need I need to archive them myself.

Counterpoint: As with books and music, the blockbusters pay for the entire rest of the ecosystem. The MCU, Star Wars, and Avatar movies keep people going to theaters, which keeps the movie theaters alive for all the "creative" arthouse films that the movie hipsters keep trying to foist on us. Most people simply choose not to watch these other films.

And last year, Paramount was the top-grossing studio until Avatar was released at the end of the year.

> An oracle-tier legal/financial arm that is essentially independent of 1 and 2 that just views itself as having a giant stack of copyrights and money and it needs to turn it into more money.

This is the main thing I think of when I think of Disney (I think of other things as well, but none of them are positive). That's why I give them the fewest dimes I possibly can.

You're dead wrong on Pixar being in #2. Cars is an absolute money printing machine.

I agree with the sentiment, but is Disney a good example? has Disney not recently had a pretty strong run of form critically and commercially?

If you're buying a DVD for your child, but only have the budget for one, would you buy Snow White, or Snow White 5: The Slushening? In most cases, the classic original is the no-brainer. The sequels to Disney movies are pale cash-grab imitations with far less cultural significance.

once again, I agree with your sentiment - this culture of simulation and replication is extremely tiresome - but as a case in point, Disney doesn’t fit the bill

to illustrate, the realistic choice would be to choose between Snow White and Frozen and Moana.

to be clear, this isn’t me blindly supporting Disney: I don’t watch their films, I don’t work for them, I don’t own their stock. moreover, I in fact have swathes of scepticism for colossal nation-shaped megacorps; nevertheless it’s a bad example weakening a good hypothesis, and this I have a problem with

Disney is a WEIRD choice here. Nobody is releasing their own old movies and pushing them on all possible markets and marketing them as much as Disney does.

> Disney will even restrict the availability of their old movies on DVD

that's because they'd rather you sign up for Disney+

But they've been doing it long before Streaming services became a thing, as long as it makes financial sense and doesn't dilute/diminish brand image they're game

I was going to make a snarky comment about how when comparing the present to the past the past has the advantage because you can just ignore all of the garbage that wasn't worth remembering but then I thought, that would actually be a pretty neat (if not particularly practical) experiment. Setup two theatres in the same area, have one just be a regular theater and the other be a theater that only features all of the movies that would have been in the theaters exactly 45 years ago and see how they compare.

The announcement says it'll be renamed to "Red's First Flight" and be re-listed "pending further review".

I wonder if this is simply a rebranding so that the original no longer appears for "Angry Birds" searches in the app store. Namely that subsequent versions make more $ per install, and having the original at a low price point is cannibalizing sales of the newer more profitable titles.

Then why only do that on iOS, and completely remove it from Android? The Play Store also supports renaming listings...

> why only do that on iOS

Higher-margin market, which means hope for up-selling.

Think “scummy anti-SEO practices”. It’s so that when people search their Purchased Apps index for Angry Birds, having not recently installed it, the older flat-price no-IAP version isn’t shown in the results, and they’ll be more likely to install an IAP version instead. (iOS lets you install apps you’ve installed previously, even if they’re delisted.)

Interesting fact. The version they unlisted is not only remake of original one, it's their latest (or at least one of the latest) released Angry Bird games. It was released in 2022. The other games they want you to play instead are technically older. When making this remake they could have included whatever modern monetization schemes they wanted (as long as it doesn't require too much changes to gameplay itself). Actual original one was removed in 2019. Removing their latest(remake) because it's too popular, make the whole thing more funny than removing actual original version which would be ~14 years old at this point.

We need copyright reform for cases like this. In particular, copyright infringement damages should be capped at a small multiple of lost sales.

That way, when a copyrighted work goes of market (or is no longer sold at a reasonable mass-market rate), there would be no penalty for redistributing it.

(Derivative works might need to be handled differently, since the above effectively invalidates the GPL, though not Apache or BSD)

I have a nuanced take on this.

Say, hypothetically, that I am the creator of a song, book, video game or whatever. One day, for purely selfish reasons that I don't need others to understand, I decide that I no longer want to offer my creation to others. Do I forfeit any and all rights over something that I personally produced; that I invented, designed, fabricated and brought into existence; just because I once offered it to others?

I know that the law takes a more social look at the issue. After a while creative works enter the public domain and copyright is no longer recognized. The timeline varies and has been extended. I think right now it is the life of the author plus 75 years or something like that because of copyrights held by corporations rather than individuals.

I don't know what the "right" length of time is. And for classics that have outlived the life of the creator and are "culturally significant" there is a broader discussion to be had.

Beyond that scenario, the principal that I come at this from is that I, as a creator, rightfully recognize and defend my own rights to the things that I pour a significant portion of myself and life into. I made it, it's mine and therefore others can GTFO even if they disagree with me.

Bill Waterson, of Calvin & Hobbes fame, had a similar view. In rare interviews he stated that the only audience he ever cared about was his wife. If he could make her laugh with the comics, that was all that mattered. Since retiring the comic he has held on to those rights very tightly. He has allowed a few reprints but otherwise does not license out the property much at all. He doesn't want any more Calvin & Hobbes works to be created. Agree or disagree, I recognize that as his right as the creator. You or I did not create Calvin & Hobbes, he did. It's his.

> Do I forfeit any and all rights over something that I personally produced; that I invented, designed, fabricated and brought into existence; just because I once offered it to others?

Nothing wrong with choosing not to engage in business. The problem arises when you want to stop people with the force of the government who want to plug the hole you've created.

Under the original copyright act of 1790 the last Calvin and hobbes would be entering the public domain at the end of this year. That seems about right to me.

I see that creator's right as existing if you never release your works to the public in the first place.

If you want to benefit from the temporary state-enforced monopoly on your works, you must submit to what the state/society determines are the fair conditions in exchange for said monopoly.

Exactly this. Copyright is restricting the rights of others (specifically speech rights). It is counter to the common-sense stance that whatever you literally put into the domain of the public is public domain.

We've decided that limiting others rights for a temporary period was an acceptable price in order to encourage the creation of new works.

All of this was explicitly and energetically debated when copyright laws were being considered at all in the first place.

Does data deserve special rights in the first place? If I make a table and sell it I don't get to control whether the buyer sells it to someone else or lets someone else look at it and make their own identical table. Same for, say, a biscuit recipe. You might say there's a qualitative difference between those things and, for example, a book or a movie, but that difference only exists because we can't communicate our memories to each other. What if we could? I don't think what is morally right or wrong should depend on a technological inconvenience.

Data doesn't deserve rights, individual human beings do.

This isn't about the ability to resell something that you bought and paid for. It's about exploiting the efforts of others for personal gain.

> If I make a table and sell it I don't get to control whether the buyer sells it to someone else or lets someone else look at it and make their own identical table.

The first half of that sentence is true, the second half is not so cut and dry.

If the design of the table is your invention, which is to say that you identified and solved problems intrinsic with that table design, you provided the artistic and aesthetic creativity that went into its look, you prototyped it, maybe you built small scale versions before moving on to the full thing, you poured years of your time, effort and money into bringing it into existence - you can apply for a patent in order to protect your investment and your creation.

If we're not talking about a table but instead an artistic creation, that's when copyright applies.

I'm a magician, and magic has an interesting history with respects to IP law. Back in the vaudeville days, stage illusionists would commonly protect their illusions through patents. And the business was cut-throat. Magicians would steal from others like crazy. Also a patent only protects a mechanical invention for a period of time. So if one magician did the exact same trick but using a different method, there is no infringement on a patent. Teller, from Penn & Teller, took what was at the time an uncommon position with respects to his works. He observed that his "inventions" were more appropriately considered theatrical works and sought to protect them under copyright law instead of patent law. For decades this was only theoretical until someone started selling a method for one of his tricks. It's worth noting that the method was different from Teller's method, but the routine, the trick, the structure was the same. Teller sued him for copyright infringement and won.

You are free to disagree with me that ideas ARE real (we can measure their effects on the physical world) and that anyone that wants to profit from the intellectual and laborious efforts of another without consent or due compensation to the creator is a parasite and a mooch. But that's the world-view that I subscribe to.

The reason copyright exists is not really to benefit the creators. That's just a means to an end. The purpose is to encourage the creation of the works for the public good, which is why copyright is supposed to be for a limited term and then it becomes public domain.

It's a business deal of sorts: we allow the copyright holder to have unusual and potent legal power for a limited time, in exchange for the work becoming public property when that time ends.

Reforming copyright length is more straightforward than trying to come up with some roundabout way to incentivize it. Angry Birds was released in 2009, 14 years ago. By its publisher's own admission, it has run the bulk of its financial value. Angry Birds should now be in the public domain, including source code that should have been escrowed as the creative work (distributed binaries are mere mechanical derivatives). Copyright is not property - one decade is plenty of time to economically benefit from a work, after which a work is solidly in the commons of culture and shouldn't be subject to monopoly control.

> Copyright is not property

It distresses me greatly that we've forgotten this so thoroughly that you see people actually saying out loud that copyright is a property right. It most certainly is not, and was never represented as such until fairly recently.

> Reforming copyright length is more straightforward than trying to come up with some roundabout way to incentivize it.

It would seem like that naively, but we've seen that even stopping the copyright term from continually lengthening has been impossible. Making surface changes to copyright (that could easily be rolled back) will take as much or more effort than rebasing copyright on a clearer, more logical foundation that takes public benefit as a baseline. With a logical restructuring would come new arguments and slogans that might build up enough inertia to get it done.

Simply cutting back copyright length is hard to argue for, because the number you would be arguing to cut it back to is just as arbitrary as the number that the media industry would like to extend it to. Hell, I think that life of the author plus 70 years was chosen because it's biblical sounding: a biblical life is 70 years, so life plus 70 is a way of saying "children" without saying "children." For that reason, I don't think "one decade is plenty" is going to be an effective argument against life plus 70; the only thing a decade has going for it is that it's a round number and people are superstitiously attracted to round numbers.

Presently, the political arguments are ultimately just pointing out the absurd inequity of the current regime, so that people stop believing in and following these laws that the content cartels bought and will continue to buy. The only way to overcome thoroughly entrenched corruption is through mass disobedience, like the "drug war". The summary of what I really think about the combination of copyright, DMCA anti-circumvention and summary takedown, restrictions created from computational complexity, and monopolistic app stores, etc is "do what you want 'cause a pirate is free".

The path to real progress is getting the masses to self actualize and use self-representing computing technology, rather than falling for the siren song of advertising dollars promising fallacious convenience. These monopolist-makes-arbitrary-problematic-decision stories are mostly irrelevant once you've escaped their proprietary locked down world. Sure, it's less good that I can't just type "angry birds" into Aurora Store and have the game magically appear, but if I cared that much about it I should have kept a copy when I first installed it. But even though I didn't I can probably find it in some android torrent anyway - similar to every other orphaned work.

The "New" angry birds are barely playable and even the "Angry Birds Classic" seem to be much worse than the ones I had on my N900 a decade ago.

But the new ones are just a piece of crap where the actual gameplay occupies the 5% of overall UI and the level design is boring as hell (levels look like somebody vomited them on the screen). It is basically how they put their child on altar and sacrificed it to Mammon.

I wanted my small children to get the Angry Birds experience but my youth memories were violated.

I hear you. My suggestion is to find an old Kindle Fire HDX 7". It's a 7" Android 4.2.2 with great performance; you can get APKs of all your old favorite games from nearly shady sources and play them as they were in their glory days, before everything started breaking. Mobile gaming was once something great.

The mobile gaming landscape could have been completely different if Rovio charged a flat $10 for Angry Birds all those years ago.

I'm sure they've made significantly more money by going freemium with ads, but in doing so they also poisoned the well of mobile gaming. Everything now is Pay to Win. Despite there being genuinely impressive games on mobile (Asphalt racing for one), the mechanics of how the game actually works makes me not want to play it.

It's not one company's decision ten years ago that shaped that whole behemoth of a market.

It is. It's just that the culprit is Apple. No demos, IAPs for free games, 70% cut on all transactions, those are the actions that shaped the overwhelming part of the mobile market into a casino-in-everything--but-name.

> casino-in-everything--but-name

Still hoping that games with "surprise mechanics"[1] get legislated into the 18+ bucket one day. That would not only keep many kids from blowing their parents' credit cards on gems but make this business model less attractive by shrinking the market.

[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/06/20/ea-defends-loot-boxe...

They were the first hit game on iOS, they set the standard for monetization strategy in the then-nascent app store world.

I'm willing to bet that the wast majority of Angry Bird users (including myself) didn't have a payment method on file at the time of install, much less would agree to spend $10 on it.

I think it's unfair to put so much blame on Rovio. Apple themselves have done a lot to discourage traditional single-purchase apps and encourage IAP and subscriptions. For example, the App Store still lacks support for free trials (outside the context of subscriptions) and upgrade pricing.

Differentiation between business models is also needlessly hard. Apps that are free with most features locked behind IAP, free with ads, and free for a limited time with subscription all look the same at first glance in the App Store and there's no way to filter on business model.

If you've got an old HP Touchpad or Palm Pre handy, you can still get the original -- free of telemetry and micro-transactions: https://appcatalog.webosarchive.org/app/AngryBirds

My first experience of Angry Bird was on a Palm Pixi. It was challenging.

Well... no surprise. It's the classic version, and you can buy it for $0.99 and have all the content, all the powerups, and none of the ads. Too good a deal for 2023.

If a gas station finds they can't sell gas at $2 per gallon, they could rip out the gas tanks and stop selling gas or they could raise the price to whatever is profitable. I'm not understanding the business logic of removing the game.

Applications on the App Store need continuous maintenance and updates.

I realize that, but it seems that a wildly successful older game would probably be able to amortize that cost over quite a few people still buying it at $3, $5, or $10.

It’s hard to get people to pay for anything anymore.

For instance, Soul Caliber was ported to iOS and it costs $10. I think I might have been one of the few people who bought it.

It seems like the only way that you can make non scammy games make sense is via subscriptions like with Apple Arcade and even then it’s probably a loss leader for Apple and they subsidize game makers.

This is partially the fault of the App Store model that doesn’t allow upgrade pricing.

It's not a simple matter of the organization making the most rational decision for the interests of the organization. Individuals throughout the organization have an incentive to suppress past products to make newer products, and by extension themselves and their own careers, look better in comparison. Organizations can behave irrationally when the constituent members of the organization have incentives that puts them at odds with the rational interests of the organization itself.

What if a gas station finds that people keep fueling up and then driving off -- the customers don't seem to want to plaster their cars with bumper stickers related to the advertisers who are paying extra to the gas station and they don't seem to want to use the fuel "filter" that requires you to put a small extra charge on your credit card every few miles or the fuel won't move from the tank to the engine?

For the sake of profitability, I could imagine the gas station might choose to stop selling gas through pumps since those simply couldn't be as profitable.

> What if a gas station finds that people keep fueling up and then driving off

I'd assume the price of gas would go up once they found it wasn't being subsidized by other sales.

Yeah, sounds like they could have just raised the price of the original. But I guess they are convinced that this would still cannibalise their other offerings, which I suppose monetise better.

So it's more like you having two gas stations next to each other - one with a price per gallon and nothing else, one with a more confusing user experience that yields more dollars per gallon of fuel than a fixed price.

The thing with mobile games is that you make 90% of your money on 0.001% of your players - the big spenders. It's "better" to have a free game where a wealthy player can spend $10k on gems or whatever, than a one-time paid game. It's a sad state of the market, but that's how the big companies make money.

They may still keep both. The bug spenders will not play the original one - it becomes challenging at some point and does not have gems.

Yes, but if the original non-monetized version is result number 1 or 2 when searching for "angry birds" in the store, then the big spenders might never come across the version you want them to come across. You can't "fix" that by just increasing the price of the original game.

The owner of the gas station also sells crack cocaine on the side. The longer people stay to fill up their vehicle, the more likely it is they'll purchase some crack cocaine. Right now, most of their clientele fill up without leaving their car, but the ones with electric cars will stay for up to an hour. So, considering both the refueling business and the crack cocaine business, the best move is to rip up the gas pumps and install more electric vehicle chargers.

I wish this comment could be printed on billboards all around Silicon Valley and just put up everywhere, just to get all those folks thinking about what they're doing with their lives.

You don't even need the sensationalist reference to crack — this is already plausible with gas stations being convenience stores (and sometimes much more).

Indeed. Modern gas stations make very little money selling gas. They make money by people buying the stuff in their store.

I don't think many intentionally lose money on gas though. If they weren't covering the cost of the gas, they would raise the price, which seems like a rational thing to do for a popular game.

Quite a few do intentionally lose money on the gas itself, but it depends on the circumstances for the particular station. They consider the gas a loss leader. People are very price-conscious when it comes to gas and will drive far out out of their way to save a couple of pennies. Very few gas stations can afford to price their gas higher than other gas stations, and there is very often a price war going on between stations.

But even the ones who don't lose money are nearly always only breaking even on the gas.

It's a lot like how movies theaters make basically nothing from the ticket sales for the movie. They make their money at the concession stand.

Tbf, it's not the original version - it's specifically the "Rovio Classic: Angry Birds" which is a remake of the original, using their newer engine - and yes, it has ads already integrated. The original version(released 2009!) has been delisted long long time ago.

I saw the same thing happen with Tetris. It was first released when the App Store came out. It was 99 cents and no ads.

It kept working and being available through the 32 bit era. But was never updated for larger screens and was replaced with an ad ridden version.

Plants vs Zombies 2 was also much worse than the original because of ads and in app purchases.

That being said, they did “bring back” Angry Birds Classic to iOS as a one time 99 cents purchase.

What kind of dumpster-fire developer gets out-competed by a game they released fourteen years ago targeted at a platform with a 320x480 screen and 128MB of RAM?

ads and pay-to-play

The AppStore pricing system and later the quick domination of the "free to play" model initiated at the same time a gold rush and a race to the bottom that has been immensely profitable for a few lucky companies that understood the trend early enough and/or had the cash to sustain large campaigns of so-called "customer acquisition".

I think the net effect has overall been detrimental for users and companies alike.

99p games should never have existed in the first place.

A decade ago mobile app gaming showed promise, no real hits but the medium showing that it has legs

A decade later it is worse than anyone imagined, no real hits just a couple games from that earlier era because they’re the only ones you can play offline at all

if I'm missing some gems let me know!

Also mobile web. Mobile web is 100% broken as far as i'm concerned.

I remember back when iPhone was just starting to take off, and a lot of the wide-eyed techno-futurists generally had some pithy retort to fans of the latest AAA console game of the form 'You can have your $40 console game, and I'll buy 40 $1 games and we'll see who has more fun'. Well, now the console games cost $70, but the mobile games are 'free'. In this case, 'free' evaluates to somewhere between $100,000 and $'Your Soul'.

That's a shame, one of the first great UX for mobile games. Nothing until that release quite matched the feeling of pulling a slingshot.

Until I read your comment I was thinking about Flappy Bird, not Angry Birds. All the comments still made sense though.

Clearly the answer is Rovio should acquire and make Angry Flappy Birds.

Pretty sure the creator of flappy bird contemplated suicide or something like that so he removed it pretty early on.

I lost faith in Rovio when they started advertising fake game footage on TikTok. They're just a clickbait company now.

I was disgusted by them when they came down hard on people making games similar in style to Angry Birds -- because Angry Birds itself is a ripoff of another game.

None of the sequels were good as the first version.

Anyone remember Tap Tap Revenge? Another game that was delisted a long time ago after a period of great popularity (15 million downloads in that game series, per Wikipedia).

That was my favorite mobile game of all time.

That was a great game and actually introduced me to several great songs. I always suspected one of the reasons they pulled it because they lost the license to the music in the game or would have to pay ongoing costs to maintain the license.

Surely this is a marketing stunt and it will be back to normal in 3 days with an oopsie apology.

"All publicity is good publicity" is a dated myth.

Refreshingly honest reasoning, at least.

The mobile games industry is such a mess and it worries me that kids are only being exposed to video games that are 80% watching ads and begging for microtransactions. If this is the standard, they may never expect more.

On the other hand, I find solace that we still have games like Elden Ring coming out that are a one-time purchase, finely crafted experience that manage to sell like gangbusters.

I don't disagree with everyone's reactions of "they're probably making a bad game if their original with the least microtransactions is the most popular"—but there's also one key point I don't see being elevated enough: archival.

It's relatively silly that when they pull these games, there's very little way to get them back—see flappy bird, for instance. With classic game consoles, you still have the install/play media like discs and cartridges. With digital downloads, you don't—and if you do, you still need some sort of code or receipt signing to play, even if you have the binary.

That's not great—we're going to have games lost to time. Sure, maybe not Angry Birds for its cultural influence, but others? Definitely.

A wedge for developers looking to boost Linux: make small, quality games that distribution makers can be convinced to include. MicroSoft did this with Minesweeper and Solitaire, and far more people than you might think demanded Windows not because it could do the tasks they wanted, but because it had the simple recreations they desired and had grown used to. The best way to crowd out the ad-laden and micro-transaction app models is to make small, very well-made, free games the norm. There are some of these games available for Linux, but most lack the polish and discoverability that are necessary to get attention and help bring people over.

I think the gaming market has changed significantly since Minesweeper and Solitaire were popular. Sure, it can be a nice quality of life boost to include some small games, but I don't think it would be a major draw to Linux. I believe the internet and mobile devices have largely filled this niche.

Ensuring existing AAA games run solidly on Linux, like Valve is working towards with Proton, seems to have a much greater impact.

I agree entirely. Valve is taking the long, but correct, way round for this. I have a Linux computer with a GPU I game on, and I use Valve's compatibility layer for most of them.

Even more true for Nokia: people bought Nokia phones (3210, 3310, etc.) because of Snake!

IIRC the official history says Minesweeper and Solitaire were both included as user-education devices—Minesweeper for teaching left- vs right-clicking and Solitaire for some other thing (drag&drop?). Not sure if the official history is true (wasn’t Freecell distributed as a Win32s test app?).

Also, if anything I’d say the old, write-your-Xorg.conf-by-hand Linux desktop included more of these than the modern glossy one: Chromium B.S.U., Tux Racer, GNOME Robots (still in gnome-games I think), there were a ton of those. As well as xneko, xeyes and so on. Whereas on Windows you needed to look on computer magazine CDs and such to find the equivalent.

Still on the Apple App Store? I was so happy to find it on there a while back. Was surprised it was so cheap, though—I barely game at all on my phone, but would have paid quite a bit more than what they were charging for that game.

Guess there's little hope of their re-releasing Seasons, then? That's the only other one I'd pay money for (or, indeed, even play for free).

I must say I am astonished at the current state of mobile "gaming". All this talent and money and I still got more enjoyment and gameplay out of free newgrounds flash games developed by a single man in his spare time.

Just the end of the new software lifecycle: company revokes access and it disappears forever.

With the magic of btdig.com you too can find all of their releases for PC and android alike.

https://i.imgur.com/EcJugS8.png

Another loss for paying customers, another win for pirates.

future online tutorial:

"How to 'write' your first "hello world!" program"

step 1: find the "hello word!" app in the store

step 2: buy it

step 3: done! you're now 'programming' your device!!!

I don't understand, is it because they do not want to change its monetization to ads and IAP's? How is having this game in the App Store making them lose money?

If it's "too popular" why would you not just increase the price to like $10? It shouldn't which way you make money, as long as you make money.

If you removed it and then re-list essentially the same game under a different name first then all the people who already own it will have to re-buy it next time they update their phone. If you just raise the price then those people who already bought it will get to keep playing for free, and that's just leaving money on the table.

If you just remove the listing, accounts who already own the game can still download the last published apk at any time - it can be found in "my apps". Even in case of free apps. In theory company can cripple the old version deliberately, but that would likely be against play store rules

It's not like there aren't a lot of other games to play out there. The market for mobile entertainment is about as competitive as any.

I don't know who Buck is in in relation to company position, but that's a lovely response :)

Huh, I would think ads and all the merchandise they sell would be enough.

Off-topic:

What a poor way to make an announcement

- low resolution image

- red flashy background full of noise

- blurry text

My eyes are still burning

It’s PopCap situation all over again after EA

Thanks! Just bought it.

This explains the current unemployment rate in the US.

When given the choice between working several hours at a job you don't like to pay for entertainment verses using a free option for entertainment that is just as good if not better, many people are choosing the former.

Did you just extrapolate a low unemployment rate from the actions of a developer of a old free mobile game?

No, I already understood the today's labor market and modern consumerism. I'm just showing a way it plays out in the real world.

Here is another example:

If you asked 100 random 20 year olds in 1985 what "success" looks like. There is a high likelihood some would mention large house, BMW, pool in the back yard, large TV, executive at a large company.

If you did the same thing today you are much less likely to get that answer. Today you are much more likely to get millions of subscribers on YouTube or Instagram and no need for a full time job.

ah yes, becoming a part of the administrative capture, the most American of dreams.

People wanted to be entertainment idols in the 80's too. They just called them movie stars. YouTube and Instagram are just different media services, and at the "millions of followers" levels they do pay enough that you don't have to hold a traditional job.

> If you did the same thing today you are much less likely to get that answer

If that's true, that sounds like progress to me.

I did not understood op's comment but it is not that hard to come up with a link (without it being a stretch) since both have a common (broad and too generalized) goal: profit maximization, which means there must be an intermediate step of instrumental convergence.

There are methods of profit maximization whose abstract functionality is basically the same, the only thing that changes are the parameters.

I sincerely believe administrative sciences tend to not make clear abstractions out of this, since that is... hard...

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