Speaking at the Inspire Conference today in London, Rovio “Mighty Eagle” Peter Vesterbacka gave the audience at update on how the ubiquitous mobile game is doing, as well as the Finnish companies plans for the future.
After passing the 200 million download mark around a fortnight ago, Vesterbacka reports that Rovio’s three titles, the original Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons and Angry Birds Rio are now seeing over one million downloads per day, and the original game is available on a total of 25 platforms. He also announced that the Angry Birds web app, launched for the Chrome Web Store at Google I/O a few weeks ago has already notched up ten million users, and that Angry Birds has now enjoyed its 300th day in the number one spot on the US iOS App Store.
For Windows Phone 7 users, it was announced that the title will be hitting before the end of June. Vesterbacka said they were ready to launch now, but Microsoft “had other ideas”.
The Mighty Eagle – that seriously seems to be his job title – also waxed lyrical on Nokia’s recent fall from grace. He hypothesised that Nokia’s spectacular lack of mindshare is in part due to their lacklustre software, but also their failure to capitalise on their market leadership.
Nokia were more interested in open standards and other “nice” things, said Vesterbacka, when they should have been locking users into their ecosystem in much the same way Apple is doing now.
For the future, Rovio has some lofty plans for the Angry Birds franchise. Vesterbacka called the games a “next generation entertainment franchise”, adding sarcastically “of course, we’re working on a movie.”
Having grown their company from 12 employees to 120 in just twelve months, Rovio clearly aren’t resting on their laurels. Vesterbacka says they have gone “all in” with the Angry Birds franchise, and in the future we’ll be seeing games based in the Angry Birds universe that are a radical departure from today’s touchscreen bird flinger. The logic for this strategy rather than moving on to a different game, Vesterbacka said, is that “you can’t be number one forever, but you can be number one for a really, really long time.”
