Angry Birds Games Go Extinct in March 2020. Angry Birds Rio Crashes, Migrates, Dies

Time to migrate, gamers.

According to a note on the App itself, Angry Birds is coming to an end and will no longer be supported.

"All good things must pass, and at the end of March we will be winding down some aspects of Angry Birds Rio including the ingame shop and adverts. The game will also no longer be available in app stores from that date, but we will continue to provide player support for those who have the game installed on their devices until the end of 2020. We want to thank you for being part of this game, it's meant a great deal to us.Keep on flinging!"

Speculation at Gamer websites was that this had to do with the Disney licensing agreements expiring. Many Angry Birds games use Star Wars characters. Angry Birds Star Wars and Angry Birds Star Wars 2 had similar popup notices.

Angry Birds is a fantasy-based video game franchise created by the Finnish company Rovio Entertainment. The series focuses on multi-colored birds which try to save their eggs from green-colored pigs, their enemies. Inspired by Crush the Castle, the game has been praised for its successful combination of fun gameplay, comical style, and low price.

Its popularity led to many spin-offs: versions of Angry Birds created for PCs and video game consoles; a market for merchandise featuring its characters; Angry Birds Toons, a televised animated series; and two films: The Angry Birds Movie and its sequel The Angry Birds Movie 2. By January 2014, there had been over two billion downloads across all platforms, including both regular and special editions.

By July 2015, the series' games had been downloaded more than three billion times collectively, making it the most downloaded freemium game series of all time. The original Angry Birds has been called "one of the most mainstream games out right now", "one of the great runaway hits of 2010", and "the largest mobile app success the world has seen so far". The first main-series video game sequel, Angry Birds 2, was released on 30 July 2015.

The first game in the series was initially released in December 2009 for iOS. At the time, the swine flu epidemic was in the news, so the staff decided to use pigs as the enemies of the birds. The company released ports of the game to other touchscreen smartphone operating systems, including Android, Symbian, and Windows Phone, and PCs.