Digithoughts

Yesterday, everyone’s favorite mobile game Angry Birds reached 100 million downloads across all platforms. This announcement came directly from Angry Birds Developer Peter "Mighty Eagle" Vesterbacka at the the Alcatel-Lucent ELEVEN API Lounge. According to Vesterbacka they are only getting started.

One of Vesterbacka’s goals is to make Angry Birds it even more pervasive. 1/3 of all smartphone users download Angry Birds, but Vesterbacka is shooting for 100% saturation. It is all about the engagement and tracking that engagement all the time. Angry Birds is played for more than 200 million minutes every day. When you do that math, it ends up being 1% of the total hours people watch TV a year- approximately 200 billion. However, Angry Birds does not get the advertising revenue that TV does.

Rovio Mobile is always trying new business models to monetize the audience. Recently, they launched their first in-app purchasable product: The Mighty Eagle. The Mighty Eagle l is used to clear a level. You can only use it once an hour, but after you buy it, it is yours to keep.  While this is currently the only product you can buy in the game, Vesterbacka’s would like to see half of the fans to buy it. 40% of the iPhone users have purchased. In contrast, social gaming giant FarmVille is happy if 3-5% buy products in the game, mostly because there are so many products available. Rovio would rather focus on one product at a time.

Vesterbacka made it a point to express how Rovio really cares about their fans and fan loyalty. This is what drives them to expand and improve upon Angry Birds. It was obvious that a plan has already been put in place for the funding they recently received. Their next form will be an online social version of the game to be released in May. Their goals for this are just as ambitious. If the 40 million active Facebook users download and play the game, it would make them the #3 game on Facebook. Angry Birds on Facebook is going to leverage the current social graph while building on top of the existing game to make it more collaborative.

But dominating social gaming is not all that Angry Birds has in store for 2011:

• 15 new levels will be added to the original games.
• Angry Birds: Seasons will have a St. Patrick’s Day version
• On March 22, Angry Birds in partnership with 20th Century Fox with launch a Rio version for the movie.  According to Vesterbacka, this is the best Angry Birds game Rovio Mobile has ever done.
• In the coming months there will be a lot of announcements around books, movies and TV. Angry Birds will be expanding in all directions!

All this from a company of just 50 people. Do you think Angry Birds will be over-saturating the market? Or do you think Rovio is doing the right thing by striking while the iron is hot?

Reena Leone Marketing and Social Media Coordinator

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