But that strong revenue number is only enough to make Angry Birds 2 the 74th highest-grossing iOS game on the current iOS charts. The free-to-play Angry Birds 2, meanwhile, attracted 900,000 new free-to-play downloads last month and raked in over $9 million in revenue, according to those same Sensor Tower estimates. According to Ars Technica, Rovio Classics: Angry Birds is currently the 2nd best-selling app that requires payment in Apple’s App Store, except:īut that chart-topping position translates to just $30,000 in estimated monthly revenue, according to Sensor Tower estimates. How far we’ve come, from “you can’t make money from free” to “our paid apps are keeping us from making even more money from free!” And it’s not for lack of the paid product being popular. Those changes were roundly criticized when they were introduced into the Angry Birds universe, but that didn’t stop the free-to-play games from becoming highly lucrative for Rovio. That’s because of the game’s “impact on our wider games portfolio,” Rovio said, including “live” titles such as Angry Birds 2, Angry Birds Friends, and Angry Birds Journey.Īll of those other Angry Birds games are free-to-play titles in which players can earn extra lives or helpful items by purchasing in-game currency or watching short video ads. In a tweeted statement earlier this week, though, Rovio announced that it is delisting Rovio Classics: Angry Birds from the Google Play Store and renaming the game Red’s First Flight on the iOS App Store (presumably to make it less findable in an “Angry Birds” search). Why? According to Rovio, the paid version was interfering with the much more profitable free versions of its games. Rovio, the company behind the Angry Birds franchise, just shut down its last remaining paid version of the games. At this point, the examples of such business models are ubiquitous, but it wasn’t all that long ago that you would hear executives from various industries flatout state publicly that “nobody can make money from ‘free’.”Īh, the irony. Whatever you lose in not charging for some content, you can make it up via an increase in reach and/or market share, assuming you do it well. The idea, which can certainly be counterintuitive, is that if you make parts of your product free to the customer, particularly the parts that are reproducable at zero marginal cost, then you can build in value-adds one way or another that you can charge for. For a long, long time, we at Techdirt have been advocating for business models that make use of free content. You have to love a story that comes full circle after all these many years. Tue, Feb 28th 2023 03:30pm - Timothy Geigner
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