I love Angry Birds. I thought it was a legitimate game of the year competitor last year (though the more traditional gamer in me would have to give the award to either Limbo or Heavy Rain). Rovio is head of the pack of promising mobile developers right now, even though Angry Birds was their only hit in numerous attempts, simply because they are doing a lot of things right with partnerships and distribution.
About a month ago, Rovio partnered with Bing to cross promote the products. Bing made a few short videos about how the Pigs were using Bing to aid in their attempt to capture the Bird eggs. Pretty silly, but more than 200k people watched the first two of four episodes on youtube, so maybe it wasn’t a terrible deal for Bing to get their product associated with some comedy, especially since it distances the brand from the “Microsoft is an evil monopolist” image. Not sure if the videos do anything for Rovio, though.
The partnership also added a search button to the game itself, which appears after you’ve lost a level multiple times. Instead of resetting, you can push the “Bing for help” button, which launches your phone’s browser, points it to bing, and auto-searches for a walkthrough.
This is the dumb part: The first hit on Bing is to a walkthrough page with only a video, hosted by a third party, and it doesn’t even return results for the right level in the first two hits. So the Bing button is basically useless. Here’s the Bing page with the disappointing results for my attempt to get help on level 6 of the latest rendition of seasons. Only one result on the page is actually the answer I want, and it’s the last result.
This would have been a great opportunity for Rovio to completely control the user experience. They identified a problem that Rovio couldn’t control initially which negatively impacted the user experience (people would have trouble with the game and exit to go search for a walkthrough, often a tedious task when typing out the name of the game and the level on a phone browser). Rovio then took steps to improve the experience: automate a search, activated with just one click, when the user is having trouble. But they missed the last step of creating their own walkthrough on their own site, which would have guaranteed user satisfaction with the result they found (Rovio could have chosen how much to help the user that way, maybe withholding certain tips on certain levels or giving more detail on the hardest ones). Rovio would have also kept all the advertising revenue from those pages, which, while not much, would have probably been something decent if they were pointing all walkthrough traffic there. It also would have eliminated the proliferation of low-quality walkthrough sites, evidently a problem from the Bing search.
So -1 for Rovio on that deal.
danielmarkmiller.net 