Angry Birds, the once-popular gaming franchise, will no longer be available for PC and Windows Phone users.
The news comes courtesy of an email response from Rovio, the game’s maker, to a developer on future updates for the game and published by Microsoft-focused news site Windows Central. The company’s focus remains on its games on Android and iOS.
Rovio has removed Angry Birds for PC downloads from its site even though they are still available on the Windows Store. The games are still, reportedly, available for installation on mobile as well. Future updates are definitely not forthcoming, though and it may be just a matter of time before they disappear altogether.
While the decision may have caught quite a few people by surprise, it is not surprising at all. Most top app developers have in recent months abandoned Microsoft’s mobile platform. However, Rovio’s decision as a game maker may be a bit extreme since with Windows 10, Microsoft has adopted the universal Windows platform that allows developers to develop for its entire platform with one go.
It is 2016 anyway. Who is still playing Angry Birds? Will it really be missed on Windows?
Angry Birds titles on Windows have not been updated in over a year and neither had even been updated to a universal Windows app. Neither have newer games been made available on Microsoft’s platform. For the PC, users could only access the old Angry Birds Space I used to pass time on in boring late afternoon classes back in college. So the tell-tale signs have always been there.
Anyway, it is 2016 and Angry Birds has fallen in the pecking order of must-play titles and Rovio has undergone its fair share of turbulence internally thanks to tanking sales. The GPS-based augmented reality mobile game Pokémon Go is all the rage right now and soon the world will move to something else as well.
