Hail Mary Plays: Video Game Companies That Came Back From Failure With One Hit Title

Rovio

51. That’s the total number of games Rovio had made before they finally managed to take the world by storm with the release of their runaway hit mobile game, Angry Birds.

Starting out on humble beginnings, Rovio was founded by three Finnish university students after winning a mobile game development competition in 2003. Though they were in it for fun, this eventually led them to building dozens of games, either as contractors or as indie developers.

Despite their heavy output of games, most of these failed to create any meaningful splash in the market. Rovio eventually found itself on the verge of bankruptcy, and the company soon decided to pool eight months of its attention into a small game that involved round (and angry) cartoon birds that were trying to rescue their eggs from a horde of little green pigs.

The rest, as one would say, is history. The Rovio Entertainment of today exceeds a $500 million market cap and doesn’t show signs of losing traction. They were the Angry Birds maker and still are the Angry Birds maker, with many more games, as well as films and television shows, now existing comfortably under that sole brand.

Of course, this continued success hasn’t been without a noticeable shift in the developer from paid apps to the freemium monetization strategy that plagues the mobile games market today. But that’s a discussion for another time. Long story short, Rovio’s Angry Birds was a literal game changer that pulled the company out of obscurity.

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