Angry Birds developer raises $42 million
Angry Birds developer Rovio raises $42M from investors and names Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstroem to its board.
Hardcore gamers can bemoan the success of Angry Birds all they want, but that hasn't stopped Finnish developer Rovio from securing $42M in investor capital during a recent funding round. (via Reuters)
In addition to securing another heaping mountain of 'seed' money (excuse the pun), Rovio also announced the appointment of Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstroem to its board of directors. The latest round of funding was co-led by Accel Partners - who previously helped secure funding for companies like Facebook and Admob - and Rovio intends to use the new funding to leverage Angry Birds into a "fully fledged entertainment brand."
"This investment will give Rovio wings," Zennstroem said.
The company is hoping that Rovio's new wings - constructed from the fresh 42 million feathers - will help Angry Birds break the 100-million downloads mark. It seems a reasonable goal, considering that the game has already been downloaded more than seventy-five million times, and is played by forty million of those users on a monthly basis.
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replyComment on Angry Birds developer raises $42 million, by Jeff Mattas.
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Angry Birds: The Flamethrower!!!!
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This could be amazing!
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Their office is going to be awash in hookers and blow for quite some time. Who'd turn down free money anyways?
But in all seriousness they'll probably use it expand and make new games which is great for gaming on my phone.
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It's hard to say on what OS this game did the best on and I assume if it was mostly on the Android market. It probably wasn't hard to get some numbers due to the pure amount of shit that stinks up the Android market currently. When you have a weak sauce market place and have something that outshines a turd, you don't have much competition.
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Obviously your just not hardcore enough.
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I think it's a bigger issue than "haters gonna hate." Many hardcore gamers still see casual games (with low cost to dev and high profit margin) as a threat to hardcore AAA games which are orders of magnitude higher cost/time investment to develop.
Why would anyone bother making a huge AAA titles (particularly RPGs like Elder Scrolls, Fallout, with huge breadth and depth of gameplay), when you can make Angry Birds and roll in the cash?
Of course the demographics that play each may not even overlap much. I also like to think there's some integrity left in the industry though, that games are art and hardcore games will always be made for the sake of it. I understand the thinking that casual games will kill hardcore games though.-
i don't see the distinction any more
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it's not an either-or thing though. there's clearly still an audience for FPS PC games, so as long as there's a market it's going to be viable business. you just need to properly adjust. plus there's the matter of purely making stuff because there are people who want to make it and people who will buy it. the audience for making an artsy-fartsy movie is significantly smaller than the audience that will go see Transformers 3, but that doesn't mean every studio will try and make Transformers 3.
and you can also see examples of shifts in how games are made. for instance small-scale, 2D platformers became less viable to make as AAA games but it's still totally possible to make one with a small team (as small as one or two guys) with modest funding and come out on top. adventure games became less viable in the late 90s but Telltale figured out a way to make them profitable. and so on.
thinking casual games are a threat to anything is kind of silly. there will obviously always be a much bigger market for Angry Birds and whathaveyou but it won't make people suddenly stop making awesome games. they just need to figure out how to make it work.
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Is there anything "hardcore gamers" don't bemoan?
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I love you, Angry Birds developers!
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As a "hardcore" gamer...I enjoy this game. Its simple cute fun...its not some amazing revolution in gameplay and it doesn't need to be. Being a hardcore gamer doesn't mean looking for things to be annoyed by.
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Also, not every game needs to be what *you* want or what *I* want...and not every game is taking money away from all the other games. Angry Birds isn't taking the money out of your pocket that you'd spend on the next Quakeworld (someone needs to make the next Quakeworld by the way...I realize I'm dreaming, but hey) or the next Elder Scrolls. If Halo didn't ruin the FPS (though I want another Quake dammit), AB won't ruin gaming as a whole.
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yes that is true . You can also see the developers here http://www.angrybirdstips.net
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