Angry Birds cross 500 million downloads | Hacker News Reader

Angry Birds cross 500 million downloads

arcticstartup.com

26 pointsvilpponen10 comments

I've never understood why or how Angry Birds had become such a phenomenon. It managed to really separate itself from a plethora of mobile games and seems like it's the modern day version of Pac-Man. I've even saw a Today interview where Dick Cheney says that he plays it on the iPad. I would've thought with the plush toys and Chrome OS commercials that they would soon jump the shark.

Congratulations to Rovio for creating a game that's universally loved by people of all ages.

> I've never understood why or how Angry Birds had become such a phenomenon

See http://www.mauronewmedia.com/blog/2011/02/why-angry-birds-is... for a detailed analysis from a design perspective. Great read. It doesn't explain all the "why and how"-s, but does provide some interesting clues.

Thank you for the link. It was extremely interesting. This explains why my two favorite games on iOS (Canabalt and The Impossible Game) were never quite as popular as Angry Birds.

Man, I love The Impossible Game. Have you beat all four levels? I'm stuck on the "let's flip all this shit upside down randomly" level.

I haven't got past the first level, but that is the reasoning behind the first link. Short-term memory only lasts for so long and there is only so many things you can keep. Angry Birds is something you can play naturally with only your instincts. For a challenge you have to get three stars.

At its core, both The Impossible Game and Angry Birds are simple, but one is more successful to past to the next level. If you get one star on Angry By Birds, you can pass. On The Impossible game you have to have timing and be aware of what is coming up. I suspect this is the reason why the original Super Mario Bros. became so popular.

I talked to Peter Vesterbacka (the Mighty Eagle/marketing guy) some 10-15 minutes ago about this. He said that looking back, it's easy to state that they've done all their marketing acts differently from everyone else and that is probably, according to him, the main reason that they are seen something different from similar games.

I wonder if this is true in regards to marketing. I told my one of my kid sisters that she could get Angry Birds a year ago on my iTunes account, and she got excited. This was before the marketing (I assume).

My thinking is that while the game reached 100 million downloads quite fast - the ramp up to 500 million was a lot faster. You can't keep up the hype if you don't do things differently.

I talked to Peter Vesterbacka a little more and also published another article based on this discussion. I believe it also opens up their thinking regards to expansion quite well.

http://www.arcticstartup.com/2011/11/02/rovios-plan-conquer-...

Not sure how many of those were the 'Lite' (free version). My guess is that once Angry Birds started getting rave reviews, lots of people started downloading the Lite version. Still that is a lot of downloads =)

What's the point of these kind of announcement when there is no data to back it up? They could have just as well made this up and there's no third party measurement that can validate their numbers.

Rovio is just milking this cow to the max and until they announced or released another hit game, it's all a show.

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