Rovio and mortality

Here we go again... 

I swear I'm not looking for there stories, they're coming to me! I can almost turn these 'Mortality' stories into a mini-series covering the inescapable inevitability of death and the soul cracking chaos that descends upon the unprepared in the face of that eventuality. Although in actuality, today's story is a bit of a different look on that same concept; this time we're looking at a publisher who is actively playing up the terror of mortality in order to profit and generally enrich themselves. Because there's nothing more frightening than the sensation of knowing something you once loved will one day no longer be there. Part of the deceit of the Internet is that it is 'forever', which runs true all the way until a Yugoloth-cultist cuts one of the underwater cables and the magic box in our rooms go "bye bye". (I assume that's what the premise of GTFO is about. A desperate suicide mission to restore the world's internet access.)

The developers of today's topic would be none other than Rovio Entertainment- and I'm seeing a lot of blank stares... They're the guys who made Angry Birds; you know them. Now you may not know this, but Angry Birds is a franchise of games that is still alive to this very day, believe it or not! That's right, the crappy app game you used to kill time with during break times at School is getting new entries even now. (I figured that god-awful movie would have finally made the world good and done with the mauve menace and his menagerie of malcontents.) In fact the latest game in the franchise is 2022's 'Angry Birds Journey' which features 3d Renders being slingshotted about in a more service-style game that is easier to monetise than the base Angry Birds package. It's as mindless as you'd expect and after all these years making the same sort of game you'd have figured that these developers would be out of fresh ideas by now. But the truth is, these probably aren't the same developers and they are out of ideas anyway.

Because rather than ride the same course that game developers do the industry over, and expect the merits of your new and recently released game to lure old fans back into their wallets; Rovio have decided to tug on that string that gamer's are most afraid of- the mortality of their software. Angry Birds 1, the original from all the way back in 2009, has been sentenced for the chopping block to be pulled from app stores entirely. Firstly the game will be renamed to 'Red's First Flight', to obscure it from search results, then when the dust is good and settled Rovio are going to lead it out behind the KFC and have that piece of history converted into heavily processed wings. Now to be fair, the game they're killing off is actually a faithful remake of the original game because the original and every Angry Birds franchise game from 2014 and before were delisted and removed back in 2019 for no publicly apparent reason. But the team released the remake they are now killing of because they were impressed on, by the internet, the historical significance of the game that literally made all of their careers!

I'm not sure why I take this so personally, but there's something deeply insidious about callously casting away your own heritage twice like that. Picture if the Rockstar develoeprs turned around and delisted every GTA game from the 3D era so that they could sell us a- wait, that's a bad example. What if my beloved hero game Marvel's Ultimate Alliance was killed from stores just as the new game released, conveniently funnelling traffic towa- wait, that's an even worse example. Okay, let me think about this a bit harder. What if Nintendo- actually there's no point even going down that train, is there... Wow, I guess this breed of cold and callous disregard for 'gaming history' has itself a bit of precedent, doesn't it? And all because George Lucas refused to offer up the unaltered original cuts of Star Wars to the American National Film Registry. (I can't prove that had anything to do with how the game's Industry treats it's past, but I'm going imply it does anyway.)

It would be utterly pretentious of me to sit here and make wild assumptions as to why the Rovio team chose this cause of action, particularly when they quite literally put out an exhaustive statement detailing their reasoning without any compunction of how it would reflect back on them. So what were the issues taken into account? Well, the team looked at their figures, realised that some people were still playing the original Angry Birds remake (which, by the way, released two months after Angry Birds Journey, so that isn't so crazy of a possibility) and then concluded that the old game had some form of sales impact on their currently supported title. The team was shook into action by the competition within their own library, so decided to shut down the choice of the consumer in order to funnel them towards the more profitable, easier to exploit, avenue of 'Angry Birds Journey'.

This is about as blatant and no-holds-barred as you can feasibly get when it comes to public relations; telling the populace that it is very much their own preferential habits that formed the companies problem, and by manipulating their access to the possibility of choice, Rovio can be venerated. The less exploitable app was just too popular to exist within this modern mobile gaming world. Now obviously I think we all just assume that this is the way these companies operate and that these are the sorts of issues that they take into account, but how often do you hear proof of those immoral dedications baying from the horses own chops? And the conversation here doesn't just touch on wider issues of game preservation, although that conversation is absolutely there to be had; but on intentional manipulation of software availability by a company that seem to very much not have the interests of it's consumer base to heart.

Not that I think anyone is going to be shedding any tears over the happenings of Angry Birds games, but what about that proposed New Vegas Remaster I covered recently? A revisit to the core systems that made the classic New Vegas, buffing them up for the modern age, probably making that remaster totally incompatible to the thousands of old school New Vegas mods in the process. What if Bethesda then move to pull the original New Vegas from all digital store fronts, thus forcing people to pick up the new game within which will most likely exist the companies newest paid-for mods iteration which they're thinking of reinstating later this year. Think I'm being alarmist? I literally just repackaged the exact real-world situation that happened with Skyrim Special Edition. You can't buy the original edition of Skyrim anymore, all you have is the version with the Creation Club attached on top of the package.

I've said it before but until there's action done it needs to be repeated, the relationship between consumers and gaming software needs to be addressed with legislation. If we continue to persist in a system where game disruptors are fully within their rights to withdraw access from paid-for products, this entire industry we're playing within will continue to teeter on the brink, beholden to the whims of whatever unrepentant faceless 'Corpo' is holding the cattle prod. Nothing lives for ever, to be sure, but you'd at least wish for something of a natural life span for the games that we play. Can we at least wait until hardware makes those old games incompatible before pulling them from sales? Is that asking for a bit too much? Or are we all happy moving towards a theoretical future were everygame that is no longer generating active profits can be forcibly plucked out of player's hands by the whim of the publisher? Because that's not a environment I want to flourish within.