Angry Birds has become a cultural phenomenon in recent years. The immense popularity of the pig bashing game had even led to me digging up some incredible statistics and vaguely interesting facts about it.
An Astonishing Number of Downloads
How many times has Angry Birds been downloaded across the world and on different platforms? 2 flipping billion times, that’s all. If everyone who has ever played it had only downloaded one version once then 30% of the world’s population would have an Angry Birds game. In fact, there have been more downloads of the game than there are people in Africa, Oceania and Europe combined. The beta version for Android was downloaded 1 million times in 3 weeks, while one single day (December 25 2012) saw 8 million downloads made over different platforms.
Cheap and Not So Fast to Make
The incredible success of Angry Birds didn’t come at as high a cost as you might think. Apparently it cost not much more than $100,000 to make the game. 4 people made it and they spent 8 months on it, because it wasn’t classed as a high priority project for the developer Rovio. After it was released things moved more quickly. It only took 2 and a half hours to get to the top spot in the App Store charts.
The Mighty Eagle
A guy called Peter Vesterbacka is the official spokesman for Rovio. His job title isn’t Official Spokesman, though. No sir, he is the Mighty Eagle. No, I don’t know why.
A Lot of Money
The latest figures I could find suggest that the annual profits of Rovio – based largely on Angry Birds – have passed $70 million. In 2012 they made $200 million in revenue. There were rumours that Zynga wanted to buy them out for over $2 billion.
Famous Fans
?With so many people across the world having downloaded Angry Birds it is safe to assume that there are plenty of famous people who throw birds at pigs while relaxing backstage, writing new songs or wallowing in a bath full of champagne. Some of the celebrities to have admitted a penchant for the game include Conan O’Brien, Angelina Jolie, Kylie Minogue, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, John Hamm, Justin Bieber, Pete Wentz and Anna Kendrick. And those are only the ones who have admitted to being addicted to the game.
Millions of Hours Every Day
It has been estimated – and I’ll confess right now that I have no idea how they even worked this figure out – that people all over the planet spend 200 million hours a day playing Angry Birds. If you think about it, that is quite a lot of time really. If we all dedicated those hours of bird chucking to something more productive we could end world hunger, discover a cure for cancer or all learn how to make better cup cakes.
Hopelessly Addicted
Stopping isn’t easy, though. 12% of players claim to try to stop playing occasionally because of a fear of being addicted to Angry Birds. No known cure for addiction to the game is known, although I would humbly suggest that being thrown from a real life slingshot at a bunch of pigs might help.
The Park
If you are ever in Tampere in Finland you might wonder what there is to do. I’ve heard great things about the giant ice sculpture and the Lenin Museum. However, if what you want is Angry Birds style action then you will find it at Angry Birds Land. This isn’t the only park on the planet to celebrate the game. There is also an attraction in the Window of the World Park in China where you can fire giant stuffed birds at green balloons. Another Angry Birds park is due to open in Malaysia in 2014.
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