Quick, take a guess: what was the most popular mobile app downloaded in 2011? Facebook? Twitter? A navigation app?
Nope. It was Angry Birds, a game only two years old and yet so ubiquitous that everyone from Prime Ministers to Heisman Trophy winners are fans.
Angry Birds is made by a company called Rovio. Rovio wants to be the next Disney: a company that makes beloved characters and brands and makes money from them every way possible.
And they look like theyre on a good way to accomplishing that, with $100 million in revenues only two years after being nearly bankrupt.
Published byEvgeny Obedkov
Angry Birds 2 remains the highest-grossing game in Rovios portfolio. It recently achieved a new high by surpassing $500 million in lifetime earnings.
- According to AppMagic (first spotted by Mobilegamer. biz), Angry Birds has made $500. 8 million from in-app purchases since its July 2015 launch.
- The US accounts for 66.3 percent of the game’s lifetime revenue, with Germany coming in second with 6%, the UK with 5%, Canada with 3%, and South Korea with 2%.
Angry Birds 2 worldwide lifetime revenue (via AppMagic)
- Angry Birds 2 also generated 360. 5 million downloads. The US is also the number one market with 67. 8 million installs (19%). %20It is followed by 12% for India, 8% for Brazil, and around 2%6% for both China and Russia.
- The App Store accounts for 556 percent of the game’s lifetime revenue when it comes to platform shares. In terms of downloads, %20Google%20Play%20is%20the%20leader%20with%2063%%20of%20all%20installs.
Rovio: The Little Gaming Company That Could
First, a little background.
In December 2009, however, Rovio released Angry Birds. It became a hit within just a few months.
Angry Birds is the most downloaded game ever, having been downloaded over 600 million times on all platforms and in both paid and unpaid versions. The game’s development only cost the company about $140,000.
Making Money: Not Just From The Game
At the moment, Rovio is primarily focused on Angry Birds, but that encompasses much more than just the mobile game that you and I play.
The four primary ways the company generates revenue are covered in detail below:
- Paid game downloads
- Ads in free game downloads
- Partnerships and Franchising
- Merchandise/products
According to our estimates, Rovio still receives the majority of its income from the sale of different Angry Birds games.
Some reports say that as much as two-thirds of the companys revenue comes from game sales. “Angry Birds” is just one game, but it comes in many versions (“Angry Birds Seasons”, “Angry Birds Rio” and so on) and on many platforms.
Prices vary from free (with ads) to $4. 99 with a frequent pricepoint at $0. 99.
So just how popular are all these versions of Angry Birds? Exact numbers are hard to come by, but estimates are impressive. After just $10 million in estimated revenue in 2010, the company is said to be on track to make $100 million in revenue in 2011.
After sales of games, ads are the biggest source of revenue for Rovio and are essential to the company.
Peter Vesterbacka, a co-founder of Rovio, asserted that Angry Birds receives 10 billion ad impressions each month and even referred to the game as an advertising network to rival Google.
Android revenue is almost entirely ads, which are handled by Googles AdMob. Small banner ads appear periodically throughout game play, as you can see on the screenshot at right.
Rovio also uses creative partnerships that double as ads, in a sense, for both Rokio and their partners. For example, on the Chrome browser version of Angry Birds, a game sponsor is Wonderful Pistachios. Their logo appears prominently in the game, and players are told you can buy specially-marked bags of the pistachios and get special codes to unlock features in the game, or win prizes.
These are only a few instances of how Rovio is progressively entering the social realm: by including products into the gaming experience (rather than merely displaying a static or irrelevant advertisement), users are prompted to engage with the product, other users, and the game.
Additional instances of Rovio’s progressive adoption of more social media tools include an integration with Google (the company states that the game has 80 million users on Google), a test version of the game on Facebook (a more complete version is reportedly under development), and live events and parties where guests can play the game in groups or compete with one another for prizes.
Rovio has also recently partnered with Roku, the streaming content service (including a special Angry Birds-themed Roku box that includes the game, for a regular price of $119.99) and released a version of the game that works with a hand-held device that can be waved in front of the Roku and TV screen to play. A regular Roku box that has the remote needed to play Angry Birds costs $99.99.
However, extending its merchandising and number of retail locations is Rovio’s next major move.
The company began selling merchandise online about a year ago, and has expanded the number of products you can buy. Now available are everything from green piggie flip flops to Angry Birds stuffed toys, to themed iPhone cases. The latest bit product push is a brand new cookbook centered around egg recipes– which, though fun, seems slightly incongruous with the game since the birds dive bomb the pigs to save the eggs, so the pigs wont eat them. But no matter if things arent quite logical in Angry Bird landanything with the characters on it has the magic touch: the cookbook, an Angry Birds calendar and two coloring books are selling respectably on Amazon.com. The Rovio store occasionally sells out of some of its products, theyre so popular.
Rovio has only opened one physical store thus far, in Helsinki. Though it was opened only in November, Peter Vesterbacka told us that it was profitable within just a few days, an impressive achievement. Rovio has also said that sales of merchandise now make up anywhere from 10-20% of its revenue.
Rovio has said much of its market is in the U.S. and the U.K.– but now the company has set its sights on China for the next major push, where its popularity is growing fast (China is now behind only the U.S. in terms of the games popularity).
Rovio opened its second office in Shanghai, and Vesterbacka has been reported to have expressed his desire to see up to 200 Angry Birds retail locations open throughout China. “We want to be more Chinese than the Chinese companies,” Vesterbacka said, quoting Bloomberg, who also stated that the company “aims to hit $100 million in retail sales in China in the first year of store operations.” “.
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