Rovio provided more details about the takedown of Angry Birds and said that if the game is successfully renamed on iOS, it may also return on Android.
Ben Mattes, Rovio's head of strategy for Angry Birds, said in an interview with Axios that the company pulled the game down because it made it harder for other Angry Birds games to find in search results.
Mattes explained that players would look for the Angry Birds game in the app store and find the original Angry Birds as the highest result, but wouldn't want to spend $0.99 on it and wouldn't end up downloading any of them.
Rovio had previously tried renaming it to Rovio Classics: AB instead of Rovio Classics: Angry Birds, but that didn't solve the problem. It also removed the name "Angry Birds" from the title's metadata, hoping it would help other titles rank higher in search results, but that didn't work out either.
Mattes told Axios that "it took us the last 10 or 11 months to address this," adding that this ultimately led the company to believe that "there was no choice but to do some 'more drastic' actions to reduce the negative impact on its portfolio".
Rovio Classics: Angry Birds was renamed Red's First Flight on iOS, and Mattes said the impact of the new name could mean that the game would either be relaunched on the Android Store under the same name, or if it didn't fix the problem, it would cause the game to be removed from the iOS platform as well.
In February, the company announced that the original Angry Birds was about to be delisted, citing at the time that "the game had an impact on the company's overall gaming offering." ”