Rovio has launched Angry Birds 2, the follow up to the hugely successful mobile game. But the Finnish firm is under-fire for a new in-app purchases system.
Early user reviews have been mixed, in large part because of a new life system that encourages users to make in-app purchases. If players want to avoid the fee, they face having to wait about 30 minutes for their characters to “regenerate”.
The Finnish games developer reported a 9% fall in revenue last year, and some experts have questioned whether it is too dependent on the Angry Birds brand.
There have been 11 versions of the game in between the two releases and three spin-offs, but Rovio is calling this one the “sequel,” referring to it as Angry Birds 2 rather than Angry Birds 13.
People are curious about this decision, so Patrick Liu, Rovio’s creative director, explained their reasoning: “This is such a big step forward in terms of the gameplay and how the game looks that it justified the name of number 2. So it wasn’t really planned like that, it just came naturally when we realized how big of a step it was forward.”