Rovio Entertainment

Well, here's the thing.

Uh, one of the, uh, enticements that, I believe the company's name is Rovio, that produces all of these Angry Birds, uh, games, and of course, once you get into the Bermuda Triangle of Angry Birds, as I've been sucked into, you start purchasing power-ups to give your birds a little extra oomph.

And, uh, happily, my long career hosting network television shows has given me resources, uh, so that I can indulge in these power-ups-

Yes

Yes, yes

Yeah

And, uh, uh, conversely, it's been pretty good for Rovio as well.

Yes.

So for Felicis, that meant finding founders outside of Silicon Valley 20 years ago when people thought Silicon Valley is it.

It's very difficult to find great talent or great companies, and yet a lot of our early big winners were in places like Ottawa, Shopify, which is $100 billion, $150 billion-plus company, Canva in Sydney, uh, Adyen in Amsterdam, Rovio in Finland.

You know, these days we have N8N in Berlin.

So we have companies in very unusual locations, and one of the things that I love, I almost feel as a VC- Who was born in Istanbul, Turkey, that I'm kind of like a Jamaican bobsled, you know, player in Olympics.

Today's guest is Will Lewton, a game designer, studio head at Village Studios, and the indie developer behind the cult game Hack 95.

Will has had stints at Sega, Rovio, and is best known for running product on Angry Birds and writing what is the book on free-to-play games.

As a consultant, he has helped companies such as Facepunch, Jagex, and PlayStation to improve their games.

And Will joins us today.

Like that.

And it's, um, annoying if you live in a in a in what is basically one room with your partner and that's going off constantly and then the sound of a siren my partner is like she's so i'm so lucky she's so patient and she put up with it um yeah so and you know it was always constantly pulling apart and soldering it um yeah i love that i love that table um Yeah.

So anyway, to go back to this story, I was in Rovio at Stockholm and this guy came up to me and I started talking about pinball and he went, oh, I play competitively and there is a league.

Do you want to come with me? And at that point in Vancouver, I had started playing professional.

Yeah, pretty much.

And it was being developed by Dash or whatever the other Rovio Copenhagen.

Well, you can still play Dash, I think.

Let me see.

Oh, yeah.

I still got Dash.

But yeah, it was developed by Rovio Copenhagen because, you know, they bought Rovio, the company that made Angry Birds.

And of course, as soon as they bought them, they're just like, just make like random mobile game stuff.

That's how it goes.

All right, and then Rovio Copenhagen to close after Sonic Blitz cancellation.

That game kind of came and went, and it's not, yeah, it's done.

And now the Sega-owned Rovio is closing its Copenhagen studio.

A Rovio spokesperson sent a statement saying, following a redundancy process, Rovio will discontinue all its operations in Denmark.

Because the process is not yet concluded, we are not able to confirm an exact number of redundancies at the moment, although altogether around 20 employees have worked on the now canceled Sonic Blitz project.

Sonic Blitz, that was the like...

All right, but yeah, this game, it got canceled.

Uh, but not just that, not just the fact that the game isn't happening anymore.

Uh, it was announced that Rovio is closing down Rovio Copenhagen, which was the studio behind Sonic Blitz.

The 22 people who were employed there are being laid off.

They said, "Oh, we hope to move them to other parts of Rovio," but who knows if that's gonna happen.

That's how they knew.

It's a, it's an advanced kind of, um, marketing maneuver, I would say.

Well, uh, pour one out for the people at Rovio Copenhagen.

We won't know what could've been.

I guess we only have two examples.

But man, there has been a problem with these two Rovio Sonic mobile projects.

Dude, they can't just promote the game and release it.

They have to do these crappy... five percent launches and then like they never seem to fully release it rumble barely got out the door dude that

My name is...

Didn't they, like, shut down a studio or something?

Rovio? No, like, a specific branch of it.

Yeah, yeah, a