I wondered when this day would come. Rovio, who frankly overplayed the Angry Birds franchise has seen profits plummet 50%. The downside of course is that 130 people in Finland will lose their jobs.



Here’s the blog post form Mikael Hed, CEO:

“We work in businesses that are so fast moving that the only constant is change. At Rovio we have always been innovative and forward-looking, and to succeed we need to be the best at adapting to change.

We are an entrepreneurial company and have been exploring multiple areas. We have been building our team on assumptions of faster growth than have materialized. As a result, we announced today that we plan to simplify our organization around our three key businesses with the highest growth potential: games, media, and consumer products. Unfortunately, we also need to consider possible employee reductions of a maximum of 130 people in Finland (approximately 16% of workforce).

It is never easy to consider changes like this, but it is better to do them sooner rather than later, when we are in a good place to reignite growth.

At Rovio we live to delight our fans. This year we have more launches and news than ever. As we consider these painful measures, we keep our eye on always delighting our fans with products they love.”

As someone who has been a small business owner for 20 years I am always surprised to watch these companies ramp up a product, over-saturate the market and then wonder why sales plummet.

In my opinion, the next one will be King, the makers of Candy Crush. Rather than focus on adding a few really good games, they are doing exactly WHAT Rovio did; putting out the same game over and over.

I’ve always said these games are about as complicated as games we used to buy on floppy disk (frankly many of those games were better) so it’s always a good idea for these companies to do a reality check. Hopefully other companies take note and slow their roll because the rags to riches to rags story is nothing new.

Good luck!