Rovio has quietly killed its game streaming service, Hatch. The service was originally launched in 2017, but it was discovered that the company had ended the service back in December 2020 without much fanfare. While the company has not explained the reason why, there is a chance that it could have been due to the lack of popularity.
Rovio, for those who are unfamiliar, is the developer of the popular mobile game Angry Birds. The Angry Birds franchise used to be a huge deal back in the earlier days of smartphones, but it has since quieted down. The company has tried to expand and diversify its offerings, and the Hatch streaming service was one of them.
According to Omdia senior analyst George Jijiashvili, “Hatch’s target demographic simply didn’t exist – this was its biggest downfall. Most of the games in its library were available to download from app stores, and the cloud gaming element did not appeal to the casual mobile gamers.” If you haven’t heard of Hatch, we suppose you can’t really be blamed, especially with there being bigger names in the streaming market like Google Stadia, NVIDIA’s Geforce Now, and so on.
The report also adds that Rovio had actually attempted to sell off its controlling stake in Hatch back in 2019, but it seems that they weren’t successful.