Game Oriented Business Model

Recently, a hot topic in the field of product development and marketing is "Gamification".

The so-called game is to introduce the product or the mechanism of strengthening and bringing benefits to people's desires in the game.

Generally speaking, the life cycle of a cell phone game is not even for several months.

But since the game of angry birds landed on apple APP Store in December 2009, it has not only survived to the present, but also received the worship of most of the time at the top of the list.

Even now, it is still popular.

This leads us to think about what is the longevity gene of this little bird.

It was the first to eat crabs.

At the end of 2009, Rovio chose apple APP Store as the starting platform for their work, angry birds.

The founder Hyde brothers, on the one hand, saw the potential of Apple's APP Store. On the other hand, they hoped to make full use of iPhone's touch screen and other hardware functions.

Rovio is confident in its product design.

Isalo, a game designer, saw a screenshot of the Hyde brothers showing a group of cartoon birds lined up to move to a pile of colored squares.

"This picture seems to have a magic power," the client recalls. "These birds have no feet, can't fly, and their faces are very angry.

We began to discuss why birds are so angry.

These simple roles make us think a lot.

Later, they joined the image of the pig, giving an explanation to the birds' angry action against the wall.

At the beginning of the design, when the outbreak of swine flu broke out, they designed the pigs as a symbol of sick green.

Later, they designed a background story to explain why birds hate green pigs so much because pigs steal birds' eggs.

The Hyde brothers initially invested only 25000 euros in the angry birds project, while Rovio employees used their spare time to design games, and they started out with interest.

8 months later, when the Hyde brothers saw that their mother was roasting the Christmas turkey was attracted by the game, they began to have confidence in the game.

"She never plays games."

"At that moment, we realized that the game was reliable."

As a result, "angry birds" was mentioned in the most important position.

Good distributors and distribution strategies are a guarantee of success.

Matt Wilson, head of Rovio marketing, said: "we have long recognized that it is not easy to enter mainstream markets in mainstream countries.

Therefore, we have followed the tactics in small countries.

They first selected Apple's App Store app store in Finland, and angry birds became the best seller after hundreds of purchases.

This is true in Sweden and Denmark as well as in Greece and Czech.

Wilson said: "at present, the UK and US markets account for 90% of our sales, but before these two markets cause a stir, we have 30 thousand to 40 thousand downloads in small countries.

Although not a large number, it may be equivalent to four times the average sales volume per application. "

At the same time, they found a way to enter the mainstream market, that is, by issuing independent publisher Chillingo, the publisher has successfully sold many games, and has maintained a good relationship with apple.

In February 11, 2010, apple agreed to put angry birds on the front page of the App Store app store in London.

In order to prepare for this day, Rovio released a video to YouTube, which is the second time that iPhone game has released videos to YouTube, and now the video has more than 17 million hits.

Rovio also created 42 new grades far beyond the original imagination and design.

Finally, Rovio launched a free version of the angry birds.

All of these are released in three days.

After that, the game quickly climbed to the top from the App Store app store about 600th.

"Sales have reached a new level," Wilson said.

By April, we had become the first place in the App Store application store in the US.

With the powerful potential energy, the next thing that Rovio wants to solve is the core advantage.

In fact, there are only two solutions: multi platform to increase the number of users; multitasking to increase user stickiness.

After entering Apple App store, angry birds went into the Android market, and now the Android version has been downloaded 20 million times.

In January this year, angry birds became one of the first applications to enter Apple's Mac app store. In the first week, it was paid 150 thousand times to download and get the first place in the sales list.

After that, angry birds landed on the independent cross platform application store GetJar, and a large number of download requests even resulted in GetJar server downtime.

Recently it aimed at Facebook.

On multitasking, its practice is to introduce new versions continuously.

At present, it has produced Halloween Edition, Christmas Edition, St. Patrick's Day edition (also known as the clover Edition), Easter Edition and several other editions. The latest angry bird downloads have broken through tens of millions of points in ten days.

With the continuous expansion of the platform and the continuous introduction of new versions, this crazy little bird is constantly drawing our attention and arousing our enthusiasm.

The cumulative downloads of 100 million times, generating $70 million, these "Wrath birds" without wings can not only save an endangered game company, but also let the small Finland company, which only used to do odd jobs for the giant, has the chance to become the "game of Empire" of Nintendo, the father of super Marie.

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The value of Association

Obviously, angry birds as a game, this is the core business of Rovio, but the game is not the whole of Rovio's grand blueprint. It can even be said that it is just his import business.

And that's the essence of the Rovio model.

The choice of social game giant Zynga is that once a game is successful, a new game with high brand association will be extended immediately. We can see that it has Farmville, FishVille, petville, Cityville and other related product lines ending with Ville.

Rovio's seasonal version is different from that of Zynga. It is a main brand running through all product versions. The advantage lies in the fact that the main brand is richer.

This is also a typical way to make a single brand.

Rovio also wants to do this, but its goal is not only in the game area, but in the whole cultural and creative field.

Jim Breyer, a partner of Accel, has an investment vision. He shared with her Rovio leaders some experiences in the Marvel board.

Marvel was originally a comic book company. Later, as the film began to grow, it finally acquired intellectual property rights through independent creation of film works, and mastered all control rights of related products.

This is exactly the development suggestion of Breyer to Rovio, and his view is recognized by Vesterbacka, the Rovio North American market director.

In fact, Rovio itself is the other brand game maker OEM, and has strong demand for its own brand.

Hyde, the two founder of Rovio, is also ambitious.

So a huge plan was born.

They judge that mobile terminals will become a new generation of mass media platform, but the mass media economic system in the past is not applicable to this platform.

Therefore, they will try to create a new form of "box office blockbuster", which, on the basis of global attraction, can surpass the limitation of mobile application platform and become a huge entertainment media empire.

And their goal is Disney at Web 2.

In the concept of Rovio, angry birds is not only a game brand, but also a brand new entertainment brand.

When you immerse yourself in a game of 99 cents, you may be willing to spend 11.99 dollars on the plush doll (they have sold 60 thousand), or spend 70 dollars to buy the iPhone 4 protective shell printed with the bird pattern, or pay for the bird T-shirt, bird cake and so on.

In addition, they collaborate with Hollywood to produce a movie about angry birds, such as Rio adventure. When the trailer was launched, the hits on YouTube on the first weekend were up to 500 thousand times.

The "angry birds" game also launched the Rio adventure special edition game, on-line 10 days to download that is 10 million times.

In January, when the "angry birds" game was launched 1st anniversary, 2405 players from 756 cities wasted a lot of time on the game.

They held an angry little bird Festival.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, Canada's post-90 pop pop king Justin Bieber, former England football superstar Gascoigne, and India born writer Salman Rashid are all fans of this game.

The essence of game

Recently, a hot topic in the field of product development and marketing is "Gamification".

The so-called game is that all fields of R & D and marketing personnel hope to strengthen the game's strong desire for people and bring benefits to the mechanism of introducing products or marketing, the ordinary experience becomes extraordinary.

At present, many foreign companies have begun to explore in this field, but the results have not been achieved.

But the emergence of Rovio is expected to take a new path in the field of game playing.

Because it itself has the unique tag -- game company.

But Rovio is not really playing games. It just makes the games of cultural and creative products the ultimate.

There is no doubt that as a company, the development of games is to make money, but what is the way to make money?

Maybe this is a problem that every game manufacturer should think deeply about.

Zynga is no doubt that in order to create a Zynga long lasting game brand through several limited life cycle products.

Rovio is a big circle, not only to create an excellent game product, but also to create a group of vivid virtual characters.

Rovio is a content company. It is a cultural and creative company. It is a company similar to Disney.

It needs more than just games, it needs to make these virtual images more humanized.

Therefore, its practice is easy to understand.

Through various versions of festivals, different images can be set up in different environments, so as to enhance the understanding of these images in people's minds.

It also makes these images more stereoscopic, more personalized, and a series of associations with virtual images through the way of filming films with Hollywood.

The essence of game is to define what your goal is first, and then draw on the mechanism of magnifying human nature in game to achieve the goal.

That's exactly what Rovio did.

On the one hand, it achieves the purpose of packaging its virtual image perfectly through a game called angry birds.

On the other hand, it adds flesh and flesh to these virtual images through videos, movies and various occasions, so as to make its image more plentiful.

Moreover, in this process, people have been in a mood of ups and downs in accordance with the established goals of the creator, along with games, stories, difficulties and plots.

It has been trying to do "game" in art, interest and aesthetics, rather than traditional games such as entertainment, fun and athletics.