The mobile gaming phenomenon that is Angry Birds showed no signs of slowing down over the holidays, with Rovio’s Ville Heijari telling the Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD blog the series racked up 6.5 million downloads on Christmas Day alone.
The number, which includes paid and free downloads of the original "Angry Birds" as well as sequels "Angry Birds Rio" and "Angry Birds Seasons," is well above the 1 million download a day average Rovio reported in June, but just a drop in the bucket compared to over 500 million total downloads for the series since the first game was released just over two years ago.
Though Rovio made dozens of mobile games before "Angry Birds," the 55-person Finnish company is now supported almost wholly by the one franchise's massive success. Besides direct sales and in-game ads, Rovio rakes in cash via licensed products ranging from t-shirts and cookbooks to upcoming parks and movies — so much cash, in fact, that the company is reportedly eyeing a public stock offering in the near future.
AllThingsD notes the 6.5 million Christmas downloads matches almost exactly the number of smartphones activated that day, causing us to wonder how many of those downloaders are simply getting the game again for a newly upgraded phone. In any case, the series has become a success story practically unparalleled in the video game world, and one the company says it plans to follow up with new series releases in 2012.
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- 'Angry Birds' downloaded a million times a day
Kyle Orland has written hundreds of thousands of words about gaming since he started a Mario fan site at the age of 14. You can follow him on Twitter or at his personal website, KyleOrland.com. Sam Spratt — the guy who made the illustration above — on the other hand, is mostly all about Facebook.
