How many of you have played Angry
Birds in one version or another?
If you have access to it now, start playing!
(That’s right, you’re being allowed to play games in a lesson!)

Institutional issues
Angry Birds is a strategy puzzle video game
developed by Finnish computer game developer
Rovio Mobile. Inspired primarily by a sketch of
stylized wingless birds, the game was first
developed for Apple's iOS on December 2009.
Since that time, over 12 million copies of the
game have been purchased from Apple's App
Store, which has prompted the company to
design versions for other touchscreen-based
smartphones, such as those using the Android
operating system, among others.

Available platforms (selected)
iOS
Android
PSP/PlayStation 3
Mac OS X
Windows
Windows Phone 7
BlackBerry Tablet OS
Facebook

Revenue streams
Rovio is investigating ways to expand the Angry Birds
brand, including merchandise, television shows and
movies.
The game's official website offers plush versions of the
birds and pigs for sale, along with T-shirts featuring the
game's logo and characters.
In May 2011, Mattel released an Angry Birds board
game, entitled "Angry Birds: Knock on Wood".
Over 10 million Angry Birds toys have been sold thus
far. Rovio opened the first official Angry Birds retail
store in Helsinki on November 11, 2011 at 11:11am
local time.

In-App Purchasing and the audience
Pay to play the ‘Mighty Eagle’ sub-game – it
extends the life of the product.
Iphone users can connect to the game centre
to register high scores.
Connect to Twitter and Facebook.
Free versions of the game are available but are
only a few levels.
A number of updates are free to existing users
(new levels etc).

Other companies that produce games for mobiles and
social networking that use in-app purchasing include…
Zynga (the ‘With
Friends’ series –
words, hanging,
scramble etc and
‘Farmville’)
Trivial Technology
(Card games such as
Cribbage, Gin Rummy
etc)

Angry Birds and Social Networking
Synergy
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In early 2010, Rovio began developing a variant of Angry Birds for Facebook. The
project became one of the company's largest, with development taking over a
year. The company understood the challenges of transplanting a game concept
between social platforms and mobile/gaming systems.
In a March 2011 interview, Rovio's Peter Vesterbacka said, "you can’t take an
experience that works in one environment and one ecosystem and force-feed it
onto another. It's like Zynga. They can’t just take FarmVille and throw it on mobile
and see what sticks. The titles that have been successful for them on mobile are
the ones they’ve built from the ground up for the platform.”
The Facebook version was expected to incorporate social-gaming concepts and ingame purchases and was scheduled to enter beta-testing in April 2011; the game
became officially available on Facebook in February 2012.
Future improvements planned for the game include the ability to synchronize the
player's progress across multiple devices; for example, a player who completes a
level on an iOS device could log into their copy of the game on an Android device
and see the same statistics and level of progress.
There is also Facebook exclusive content - "Surf and Turf," the Angry Birds
Facebook-exclusive episode .

Cross media convergence
Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio Mobile, has envisioned a feature film in the
stop-motion animation style of Aardman Animation. To that end, Rovio
has purchased a Helsinki-based animation studio to prepare Angry Birds
short cartoons on Nickelodeon, the first of which was a Christmas special
named "Wreck the Halls" that debuted in December 2011.
Rovio also hired David Maisel, former executive producer of Marvel
Studios films such as Iron Man and Thor, to head up production of featurelength films. Hed acknowledges that such a film would be years away, and
that Rovio must keep the characters relevant until then, by producing
sequels or new ports of the original game.
In March 2012, Rovio announced plans for an Angry Birds attraction due to
open in summer 2012 at the Särkänniemi adventure park in Finland.

Expanding the Angry Birds universe
Rovio officials hinted that a "sequel“ to the
game would be told from the pigs' point of
view…
This game turned out to be ‘Bad Piggies’