Yzz
Like Like
- Pronouns
- She/Her
James Cameron's Avatar is usually known for two things: its white savior narrative, and an interesting case of how something can be super popular yet unremarkable. This thread was made to discuss the latter, about how far can a piece of media go without leaving any sort of influence and/or mindshare.
Just to clarify some stuff:
- This thread isn't about the best-selling games. It's about games where their popularity is very disproportionate to their impact on the industry and the general public.
- Bad influence is still influence. Harpoony games like Clash of Clans and Candy Crush have been discussed ad nauseam
- Don't post anything that isn't at least 5 years old.
My pick for the Avatar of the game industry is not a particular title, but rather a fallen media empire: the Angry Birds franchise.
Coming right when the mobile game scene was booming, Angry Birds stood among other "crush the castle" games because of its colorful characters. The game is still a very good case about how characters can make a game more appealing, similar to what Dragon Quest did with RPGs in the 80s, or what Puyo Puyo did with Tetris. Another thing that Angry Birds had was that its game design allowed for different approaches to accomplish the goal, unlike many other puzzle games where the solutions are limited and rigid.
Around 2012, when Angry Birds Space and Angry Birds Star Wars released, the franchise was becoming a global phenomenon, something like the Pokémon of the 2010s. At that time Rovio, the studio behind the franchise, wanted to become like Disney (I'm not joking they actually said that) and funded expansion beyond games and merch. The franchise continued to grow until its peak around 2014-2015, and in that time you could argue that Angry Birds was the face of video games.
As everyone knows when the movie was released in 2016 there was a fatigue around the franchise, and then the second movie in 2019 saw a significant decline in popularity...
Today nobody cares about Angry Birds. Nobody remembers a single level of the hundreds that were made. The games aren't considered particularly good, unlike some of its contemporaries like Plants vs Zombies. The franchise didn't leave any offspring or spiritual successor, as the 'handcrafted' puzzle genre is completely dead on mobile.
And despite all this I would love to say that Angry Birds was an under-appreciated martyr that died fighting the microtransaction trend, but you couldn't even say that about the franchise since Rovio was pretty quick in embracing predatory monetization. At least Pioneers of the harpoon, like GTAV, Clash of Clans and Overwatch could say that they trojan horse'd whaling techniques into the industry, but Angry Birds didn't set any trend, good or bad.
What are other titans that didn't left a mark?