The Finnish company, when transferring Tiny Thief from paid to freemium, managed to get free levels for those who had previously bought the game at full price.
Our colleagues from GameZebo were the first to pay attention to this.
The story is as follows:
In June 2013, Rovio’s publishing division – Rovio Stars – released Tiny Thief, a cartoon Splinter Cell “for the little ones”. The game cost $2.99 and included five mission packs.
Tiny Thief was well received by the press and players. The problem, as you might guess, was that a paid game designed for a single playthrough is far from the product that has been living in the mobile charts for a long time.
In such a situation, the company had two options: either close the further development of the project, or try to transfer it to one of the shareware distribution models. Rovio chose the second option.
The relaunch from Rovio looked like this: the company added a new pack to the game, made the first three packs free, but began selling each subsequent episode for $ 1.99. Those players who had previously laid out $2.99 for the full version with the first five packs were very upset that they had been locked up with previously available missions.
As a result, after the update, the rating of the game flew down.
When asked by GameZebo to comment on such an unusual transition from a paid to a free distribution method, forcing players to pay twice for one content, the game developers from 5 Ants (Rovio Stars – publisher) responded as follows:
“We are very sorry, we didn’t mean to offend anyone, but we somehow need to finance the creation of new content.”
Despite the decrease in ratings, the box office of the game has grown after the transition to freemium.
By the way, Rovio is ready to pay compensation to all those who demand it.
Officially began its work in June 2013. Now the company has four projects in its portfolio: Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage, Juice Cubes, Tiny Thief and Word Monsters.