Published byEvgeny Obedkov
Angry Birds 2 remains the highest-grossing game in Rovio’s 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.
The Rovio Story
Although Rovio appeared to be successful right away, it wasn’t The Finnish game developer Rovio was a tiny business that was in danger of going bankrupt in 2009. It had let go of the majority of its employees, leaving just twelve. Students who thought it would be fun to start their own studio after winning a video game making competition founded the company in 2003. They had found they could create some really cool games, but getting them distributed was difficult. Before Angry Birds, they had created 51 games, but the business plan was rapidly becoming unworkable.
When the iPhone released in 2007, and Rovio thought this was their big chance. “We tried to profile the iPhone user and it turned out that it was everybody,” said Mikael Hed, the CEO of Rovio. Rovio’s previous games had catered to niche audiences, with some sci-fi and horror titles, but this time they wanted to make a game that would appeal to iPhone’s massive customer base. The team carefully considered the iPhone landscape, and thought that there were some conditions for a game to succeed: it should have no tutorial; its loading times should be minimal, and it could be happily played for just one minute, useful for the short attention spans of millennial iPhone users. It would also help to have an icon which would stand out in the App store.
The artists on the team would frequently produce ideas and sketches, but one in particular stood out. It featured several round cartoon birds that appeared unhappy for no apparent reason. “There was something about those characters,” says Mikael. “These birds have no feet and can’t fly. And they’re really angry. We all started thinking about why they are so angry. For such simple characters, they made us think so much. There was some magic to it. ”.
Eventually, Rovio discovered why the birds appeared so irate: some pigs had taken their eggs. The company therefore made the decision to create a game based on the idea, in which players would have to launch birds into the air in order to knock pigs off their pedestals. Rovio allotted €25,000 for the game, and the development of Angry Birds was done as a side project for the team. Rovio worked on other projects and created four games for other companies during the six months it took to develop the game. However, the group knew the game would be unique even as they were creating it. “You inadvertently started playing the game for fifteen minutes when you had to shoot the bird once to test a feature, and there would be five guys watching you,” Mikael claims. They also knew they were onto something when one of the cofounders’ mothers burned her Christmas turkey while playing a beta version of the game.
The game, though, wasn’t an immediate hit. When Angry Birds launched on the App Store in December 2009, the wealthy US and UK markets did not receive a warm reception. Rovio, however, was unfazed and chose to concentrate on smaller nations. The game reached the top of the charts in its home country of Finland after just a few hundred downloads. It quickly became popular in Sweden and Denmark before spreading to Greece and the Czech Republic. After 40,000 downloads, larger markets soon began to take notice.
Angry Birds was the featured game of the week on the UK App Store on February 11, 2010, according to Apple. Angry Birds eventually took off, rising from 600th to first place on the UK Store in just three days. The game was also the top-ranked app in the US app store by April.
Due to its popularity, Rovio was generating a lot of money very quickly. The game featured advertisements on Android, and users had to pay to download it from the App Store. The Android versions soon started bringing in 600,000 pounds a month for it. Additionally, Rovio skillfully developed in-game purchases, a 89 pence (Rs 90) More than 2 million copies of Mighty Eagle, a game that lets you beat any level, have been downloaded.
And Rovio moved to the offline world to cash in on its popularity. Over Christmas that year, Angry Birds started offering cuddly toys, purchasable right from the app. They’d initially ordered 12,000, but ended up selling over five times the number. By 2013, the company currently had a catalogue of more than 30,000 Angry Bird-related products on sale in more than 500 locations around the world, which accounted for close to 50% of its revenue. Several outlets, such as popgear, have cashed in on the craze for Angry Birds merchandize.
Following the popularity of Angry Birds, Rovio has kept creating new games and expanding the Angry Birds brand. It started creating massively multiplayer online games after opening a game studio in London. The company’s revenue for the previous year was $201 million (Rs. 1300 crore) from the release of the video game Angry Birds and its other merchandise. Even though the business is growing into a sizable game studio following its initial public offering (IPO), it might always be known for the straightforward, peculiar game that turned around its entire trajectory.
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