Rovio has never been shy about telling the traditional games business what it thinks, and this week the Angry Birds studio turned its attention to the console download stores, Microsoft’s Xbox Live chief among them. Speaking to UK trade magazine MCV, Rovio’s Peter Vesterbacka argued that console digital distribution is held back by a “legacy way of thinking” and that platform holders need to start behaving more like the app stores that turned his flock of furious birds into a phenomenon.
The heart of his complaint is about updates. On iPhone and Android, Rovio has kept Angry Birds in the charts by pushing out new levels and fresh content at a steady clip, and players have come to expect a game to keep growing after they buy it. Vesterbacka’s view is that nothing technical stops console download services from working the same way, and that if consoles want to stay relevant they will have to embrace frequent updates because players now expect their games to stay fresh.
A Jab At Nintendo And A History With Microsoft
He did not stop at Microsoft. Responding to recent warnings from Nintendo that cheap smartphone games are damaging the wider industry, Vesterbacka suggested that anyone selling expensive boxed games on plastic discs and cartridges would naturally be nervous about the shift. It is a characteristically cheeky line from an executive who has made a habit of needling bigger rivals.
The comments land at an awkward moment for Rovio’s relationship with Microsoft. Last year the Finnish studio publicly complained that Microsoft had used the Angry Birds icon on its site without permission while promoting Windows Phone 7. In February the two sides appeared to patch things up when Rovio confirmed a Windows Phone 7 version was on the way, although Vesterbacka’s explanation for the slow progress was memorably blunt. Asked about the holdup, he told Pocket Lint, as reported by Pocket Gamer in February, that “Microsoft has a lot of lawyers.” No release date for that version has been announced.
Slow Xbox Live Updates Are A Familiar Complaint
Rovio’s criticism of slow update cycles will ring a bell for anyone following independent developers on Xbox Live Arcade. Team Meat’s patch for Super Meat Boy, a file of less than a megabyte that fixed an autosave bug, spent more than three months working its way through Microsoft’s certification process before it finally went live at the start of February. Certification exists to keep broken updates off the service, but stories like that have fed a growing perception that console stores move far more slowly than their mobile counterparts.
For Rovio, speed has been everything. The studio launched Angry Birds Rio on March 22 as a tie in with the upcoming animated film, and the original game continues to receive new episodes on mobile platforms. That steady drip of fresh content is exactly what Vesterbacka wants console players to be able to expect too.
Microsoft had not publicly responded to the remarks at the time of writing. Whether Redmond takes the criticism on board or simply shrugs it off, the debate over how quickly console games should be able to change after release is clearly not going away.