Angry Birds was a defining game of the first decade of the App Store, so fans and game preservationists applauded Rovio in 2021 when it announced that it was rebuilding the 2012 version of the game and relaunching it on the App Store and Android as Angry Birds Classic.
The game was relaunched last spring, without a three-year sparsity from the App Store with an accent on the game preservation angle:
“While we were rebuilding Angry Birds, we took unconfined superintendency to preserve the feeling of the original Angry Birds game,” says executive producer, Sami Ronkainen. “We know our fans are a discerning tuft and will be worldly-wise to pick out plane small differences. Matching the gameplay, and visitation of the game next to the original was crucial.”
Now less than a year later, it’s nonflexible to read that as anything increasingly than empty marketing reprinting in light of Rovio’s tweeted announcement yesterday in which it said:
We have reviewed the merchantry specimen of Rovio Classics: Angry Birds, and due to the game’s impact on our wider games portfolio, we have decided that Rovio Classics: Angry Birds will be unlisted from the Google Play Store on Thursday, February 23. Additionally, the game will be renamed to Red’s First Flight in the App Store pending remoter review. Rovio Classics: Angry Birds will remain playable on devices on which the game has been downloaded, plane without it has been unlisted.
We understand that this is sad news for many fans, as well as the team that has worked nonflexible to make Rovio Classics: Angry Birds a reality. We are extremely grateful to the Angry Birds fans who have shown their love of the trademark and this game from the beginning. We hope those fans can protract to bring that passion to our live Angry Birds slingshot games such as Angry Birds 2, Angry Birds Friends, and Angry Birds Journey, where our goal every day is to craft the weightier possible wits for players.
It’s not well-spoken what Rovio ways by Angry Birds Classic’s impact on its other platforms. If I had to guess, though, I’d bet that the $0.99 price of Classic was cannibalizing sales of increasingly recent versions built virtually In-App Purchases. But why not pull the iOS version completely instead of waffly its name? By removing ‘Angry Birds’ from the name of the game, it will be harder to find on the App Store but remains available, which may have been deemed necessary politically given Rovio’s involvement with Apple Arcade. Speculation aside, though, it’s a shame to see a culturally important mobile game pulled from one platform and subconscious on the other.
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