Angry Birds downloads soar past 100 million across all platforms
During a panel at this past weekend's South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Rovio exec Peter Vesterbacka told attendees that the company's bird-flinging pig terrorizer, Angry Birds, has been downloaded over 100 million times. As Vesterbacka revealed during GDC, more than 30 million of those downloads have been of the game's freemium Android version, and both the lite and paid versions topped 2010's iOS charts. Since its release on PSN in January, Angry Birds has also dominated PlayStation Minis sales. So many scared pigs!
During his presentation, Vesterbacka went on to make a somewhat dubious claim, however, saying, "Tablets are killing consoles. Four generations of new tablets come before a new console, if one ever comes." While hardware iteration of tablets has certainly been speedier than that of consoles, we don't see tablets "killing" the home console market anytime soon. Nokia interim VP of services Tero Ojanpera apparently agrees with us, as he countered Vesterbacka by arguing that, despite the iPad 2's ability to output 1080p video, most folks won't ever plug their tablet devices into their televisions.
Not to mention, Vesterbacka and company recently hired Remedy co-founder Petri Järvilehto to spearhead Angry Birds expansion to consoles. "We want to make Angry Birds a long-lasting global gaming franchise, and we see the console platforms as a way of delivering an even more entertaining, powerful and involving experience," Rovio CEO Mikael Hed said last month in an announcement of the company's intention "to take the Angry Birds success story to current and emerging console platforms."
