Pretty much every site that reports on social games is saying, today, that Rovio is launching their next Angry Birds (Angry Birds: Rio) game on the Amazon app store.
Venturebeat noted that Rovio has an exclusive deal with Amazon for… something. Fortune is completely off-base in claiming that piracy issues on Android have something to do with it (which would make sense if Rovio wasn’t releasing their next game on Android, but they are), and PC magazine can’t get the proper nouns right in their initial post on the issue, apparently thinking Amazon and Android are synonyms when such a reality would render the story pointless. And a bunch of people retweeted all of these stories for no apparent reason. (Twitter also announced it is seeing one billion tweets a week, today, and at least 30% of them are retweeted, crappy blog posts).
First, Rovio isn’t going to give anybody an exclusive to their next big game. They did just fine making money having all of their apps on all of the major platforms, and there would be no sense to reward a game or feature that might potentially bring them money to a platform with no users (Amazon’s app store). Amazon is the first platform to go after any sort of exclusive (though it’s hard to tell what they actually got based on the “journalism” on the topic so far), but I wouldn’t expect Apple or Google to start going after exclusives anytime soon; exclusives only really make sense in the console world, and that’s because they drive console sales (at a loss for Sony and Microsoft), which then recoup money through selling 2 cent CDs for $60. The mobile platforms just take 30% off the top, and neither have shown too much interest in their games development anyway.
Second, Rovio will probably send their next app to Amazon’s portal for a week, then release it on everything else. They did that for a site with one of their previous games, and I’ve never heard of the site again. Amazon is probably hoping for a bit more success, but I’d be surprised if it works. Mobile apps already struggle with user discovery, so requiring users to go find and install another app market on their phone before installing Angry Birds: Rio is really asking a lot of a fanbase that probably isn’t completely savvy with the debates regarding the best app markets.
Third, this is too many promotions. The next game is Angry Birds, Rio (promoting an animated children’s movie), exclusively on Amazon app store. I wonder how the company behind Rio feels about Rovio releasing on a platform that surely doesn’t cater to their target audience for the movie. How many people who want this game and have an Android phone will be able to find it in that window of exclusivity?
Finally, Angry Birds was one the best games of last year, across all platforms. It was clever, it was hard, and it was capable of being played for 5 minutes or 50 minutes at a time, a truly rare combination of attributes. So I’m prepared for this next game to suck, and I’m already forgiving them and looking forward to Angry Birds 2. (the other best games of last year were Heavy Rain, Limbo, and Mario Galaxy 2, btw.)
danielmarkmiller.net 