Whenever publishers and developers do unsavory, anti-player things, they typically try to spin it into something positive. Star Wars Battlefront 2’s loot boxes were infamously positioned by EA’s community team as a way to “provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.” When Blizzard got blasted by fans for delivering a subpar Warcraft 3 remake that still had all of the original cutscenes, Blizzard claimed this was an intentional decision to “preserve the true spirit” of the original game, which we now know to be a lie.

When developers try to sell players a bill of goods, they almost never come right out and admit it. Even if most people don’t believe the spin, at least it sounds better than saying “we’re bad guys doing bad guy things.” If you need proof, check out Rovio’s very shameless public statement about why it’s removing the original Angry Birds from the App Store.

You probably haven’t thought about Angry Birds since you traded in your original iPhone in 7th grade, so allow me to briefly catch you up on the drama. Rovio was founded in 2003 by three students at the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland. The studio spent years doing work-for-hire mobile games, like Burnout and Need for Speed: Carbon, before finally launching its big hit, Angry Birds, in 2009. It’s nearly impossible to overstate what a massive success Angry Birds was. Not only did it spin off to 22 other games and a film and television franchise, but it’s responsible for bolstering the now-thriving mobile game industry in Finland. Rovio now has over 500 employees and is a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq Nordic that pulls in over $300 million/year. This is no longer a small indie start-up - keep that in mind.

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As you might imagine, the Angry Birds series has gone through a lot of changes over the past decade. As the mobile landscape has evolved, Angry Birds has evolved right alongside it. In other words, modern Angry Birds games are microtransaction-ridden hellscapes that leverage every effective psychological trick in the book to separate you from your dollars. The original Angry Birds might have only cost a dollar for unlimited, ad-free play, but you don’t get to $300 million/year (every year) unless you’re looking for ways to wring every cent possible out of your loyal player base.

Angry Birds stopped getting major updates in 2012, and in 2019, it was removed from the App Store. Fans were vocal about the delisting, so Rovio explained the reasoning in a pretty thoughtful and human letter to fans. The original Angry Birds, along with some of Rovio’s other older games, was no longer compliant with platform requirements because it was built on an now-outdated, proprietary engine. The company promised to bring it back, and in 2020, it was relaunched as Rovio Classics: Angry Birds for the original $0.99 asking price. It wasn’t perfect. Rebuilt in Unity, the physics matched newer versions of Angry Birds rather than the original, and it was also quite buggy. But it was preserved to the best of Rovio’s abilities and was made available without any MTX shenanigans, and that should have been the end of the story.

This week, Rovio announced that Rovio Classics: Angry Birds is getting delisted on Thursday for Android, and is being renamed to Red’s First Flight in the iOS App Store. The reason? Rovio explains that the game is having a negative impact on its wider portfolio, and directs fans to instead play some of the other “live” Angry Birds games.

It isn’t difficult to read between the lines. Rovio released a reasonably priced game that people loved, and all of its shitty, predatory games started making less money. Instead of leaning into that success and trying to find ways to give players more of what they love, the company has instead decided to remove the game from the market and hide it under a fake title so everyone can just forget about it and go back to uncritically consuming the buckets of filth that make more money for Rovio.

This is shameless, and anti-player decision, but it’s exactly how capitalism works in practice. In the platonic ideal of a free market society, people make products, and if they’re good, other people will buy them. Rovio made a product that’s good, that people like, but it is hurting the sales of their worse, lower quality products, so it has to die. I cannot fathom being so uninterested in your reputation, the satisfaction of your playerbase, and quality of your own games, that you’d be willing to bury your own legacy to keep the stockholders happy.

I know, I know. We’re getting dangerously close to politics here, and if the Gamers hear me talk about the burden of late-stage capitalism any more they’re going to riot. But here’s the deal: every time Activision or Ubisoft does some kind of insulting, anti-player scheme to inject NFTs into Ghost Recon or charge us for things that used to be free, we do the little ‘corporations aren’t your friends’ song and dance to remind you that every decision these faceless megacorps makes is solely driven by the profit motive. This is no exception, except it’s somehow even more egregious because Rovio is telling you right to your face that it doesn’t care about you, it doesn’t care what you like, and it only thinks about you in terms of how much money it can get you to hand over.

After reading this statement, why would anyone ever want to give this company another dime? I see people on Twitter begging Rovio to compromise by jacking up the price of Angry Birds Classics to help offset the loss in revenue to its other games, but you know what? F*** that. Infinite growth is an unsustainable goal, and a game should never get canned because it’s too successful. There’s better mobile games out there than Angry Birds, and better game companies than Rovio.

Next: Angry Birds' Shutdown Is Disgustingly Anti-Player And We Should All Care More