With a blog post and a video published this morning, Finnish game maker Rovio announced the Angry Birds franchise has reached 1 billion game downloads across all platforms. Just two weeks ago, Rovio said the latest entry in the series – Angry Birds Space – had become the fastest growing mobile game to date with 50 million downloads in 35 days. Today’s numbers mark an important milestone for Rovio, which earlier this week revealed its financial results for the year 2011 for the first time, hinting at a possible IPO in the future. In 2011, the company reported revenue of €75.4 million ($106,3 million), with earnings before tax of €48,0 million ($67.6 million) or 64% of total revenue in 2011, and hired 196 people.
Angry Birds downloads had reached 648 million by the end of 2011, confirming the company saw an additional 352 million downloads across all platforms in the first five months of 2012. The original Angry Birds for iPhone was launched in December 2009, and it took 6 months to reach 5 million downloads. Angry Birds is, according to Apple, the top paid iPhone app of all time, with other entries in the top free and paid charts for iPhone and iPad as well.
Angry Birds games are now available on a variety of platforms, including iOS, Android, OS X, Facebook, Google Chrome, and Sony’s PSP and Play Station 3. In November 2011, Rovio announced Angry Birds games had reached half a billion downloads.
