What Angry Birds and Clash Royale taught us about surviving after your game goes viral

The past several years have seen the rise and fall of viral mobile apps that strike gold for several months, falter and then fade away entirely. Games like Angry Birds and Farmville have hit the international spotlight and generated hundreds of millions of downloads, but many of them have crashed and burned.

When a mobile game goes viral, many studios bank on monetizing the hell out of the game for as long as possible. But the nature of mobile games is almost always one of gradual growth and then hockey stick explosion — and when the dust settles, many users delete the app, and the cash flow dries up, signaling a stark end to a beautiful, too-short golden era.