Category: Games Page 3 of 5

A fresh new year and it is time for the latest numbers of the Angry Birds phenomenon, and they are impressive indeed!

Most mobile game developers would be quite happy if their game would clock more than 5m downloads. Hell, they would probably throw a massive office party for that! Well, Rovio made more than that in a day (OK, it was Christmas Day): 6.5m copies of the various Angry Birds games (paid and free) were downloaded on 25 December 2011 alone. Woah!

The formidable Stuart Dredge treats us to some more background on Angry Birds. To cut it short: by December 2011, Angry Birds had more than 600m downloads. That is more downloads than people living in all of North America – all the way from Alaska down to Panama! About 1/3 of those are monthly active, 1/8 daily.

Given that they also make money (seemingly nearing $100m in revenues) and not only from games but from selling 1m toys and 1m t-shirts per month, too, it is perhaps understandable that they are said to have rejected a $2.25bn acquisition offer by Nasdaq newbies Zynga. I can understand that they may not have been too thrilled to work under the hard-charging (according to some, too hard-charging) “CityVille-ains” but I still wonder if that would not have been a worthwhile cash-in (though it would arguably have been a share deal and Pincus only knows what on which valuation of Zynga that would have been based!).

Rovio has great plans, they are hiring senior entertainment talent (Dave Maisel of Marvel fame for instance), they are diversifying quickly, they execute with adorable flawlessness. But they have not yet shown that they are capable of repeating the creative spark with equal vigour and verve. On the one hand, they are a very, very talented bunch (I published games by them previously: great content and lots of polish). And they have some serious reach now, which gets them a lot of promotional punch. They have also been great in getting out on as many platforms as possible to make sure to fuel the brand as a true mass market proposition rather than contentedly sitting on iOS only and being happy with that niche (bear in mind that J2ME is still many times larger than iOS in terms of reach; for brand awareness of a consumer brand, this is a crucial factor).

However, it is a hit business, isn’t it? And I doubt there is a recipe (or that Rovio has it): Anecdotally, Chillingo, the publisher of the original Angry Birds on iOS (subsequently acquired by EA), uses its Chillingo label for the “premium” games and their Clickgamer for the rest. Angry Birds was published under the Clickgamer label. So did anyone know? I don’t think so.

I would love to see them thrive because they deserve it: they are a hard-working and lovely bunch. So go, my good folks, mighty Eagles, Albatrosses and the whole swarm!