Angry Birds 10 years later

Angry Birds. © Rovio Entertainment Corp.

Created by Finnish company Rovio Mobile Oy, the mobile game that went on to take the world by storm was launched for iPhone and iPad on December 11, 2009, 18 months after the debut of the iOS App Store. After selling over 12 million copies on iOS, the game was ported to several other platforms of the time: Palm Pre (August 2010), Android (October 2010), Symbian^3 (November 2010), Windows Phone (June 2011), among others. Who can truthfully say that they’ve never wasted a few dozen hours of their lives hurling chubby birds at green pigs with a slingshot? However, this kind of overnight, global success is never long-lasting. In 2014, after many variously successful versions of the original game, Rovio’s revenues collapsed by 73%, and the company that grew too fast had to lay off nearly a third of its employees. By 2015, the company had turned an operating profit of €10 million into an operating loss of €13 million. Today, the saga of angry birds continues, with the launch, a year ago, of Angry Birds Dream Blast, a game that uses artificial intelligence to optimize the difficulty of the different levels. It has met with success, with sales of over €60 million.

⇨ YouTube, “Angry Birds 10th Anniversary highlights!.”

⇨ ZDNet, Stan Schroeder, “At 10 years old, Angry Birds is keeping players hooked with machine learning.”

⇨ GamesIndustry.biz, James Batchelor, “How Angry Birds broke the limits for mobile games.”