Many startups never see any sort of growth. Their big project—the one designed to catapult everybody involved to fame and fortune—fails to make much of an impact in the marketplace, and the business eventually crumbles away. Then you have the startups that ride a single hit to the promised land, and grow accordingly, only to find it impossible to sustain momentum over the long term. That’s exactly the problem confronting Rovio, the maker of the popular (and at one point, seemingly ubiquitous) Angry Birds mobile games, which just announced plans to lay off 260 employees. Rovio’s current layoffs aren’t its first: In late 2014, it announced that it would cut 110 workers (at the time, 14 percent of its workforce) as part of an attempt to consolidate operations. Although the original Angry Birds game became a massive hit soon after its release in 2009, Rovio’s attempts at producing sequels (Angry Birds Space, Bad Piggies, and many, many, many more) were met with mixed success, and gamers’ attention soon drifted to other games. Rovio isn’t the only company to struggle in the wake of a massive hit. Zynga, an early pioneer in “social” video games such as FarmVille, has famously struggled to transform its early successes into sustained and healthy growth. Unlike Rovio, which chose to put the bulk of its efforts behind games in which the player hurls irritated fowl into pigs, Zynga tried to diversify its software portfolio beyond a single franchise—but structural issues, including an inability to swivel smoothly into mobile gaming, have so far thwarted its best intentions.
