Rovio Mobile passing on Chillingo in the future
Chillingo closed a huge deal with EA yesterday (becoming the second big iPhone publisher in as many weeks to be picked up), but the company's work with its biggest title apparently left a bad taste in the mouth of the developers, Rovio Mobile. That company tells TechCrunch that they'll never work with Chillingo, or any publisher, again. That's not so much a reflection on Chillingo, though, as it is on Rovio's success -- Peter Vesterbacka says that with the way the App Store is set up, you just "don't need publishers" any more.
For a lot of iPhone developers, I would disagree -- Chillingo has put together a nice set of iPhone titles over the past few years, and seeing their name on an iPhone game can give a nice boost in profile to a developer just starting out. Obviously EA agrees -- while this doesn't mean we'll see EA start taking advantage of the Angry Birds license (necessarily -- I'm sure Rovio is poking around in as many places as possible to recreate the Angry Birds game on other platforms), it does mean that EA is getting access to a significant amount of experience in creating, publishing, and marketing iPhone games. Chillingo seems to have a talent for finding titles of solid quality that are willing to experiment a little bit, so this should bring us some more EA games that are outside of the standard Madden/Need for Speed/Tiger Woods ilk.
As an iPhone user, I'm excited about both the Chillingo and the Ngmoco deals recently -- both will create more options for two iPhone publishers who have made a solid name for themselves, as well as bring a little more standing to the platform at large as a great place to publish and release great games. Rovio's done with iPhone publishers, but the rest of us are just getting started.
