It’s the year of Angry Birds, undoubtedly, and Rovio has made a killing with the mobile game as the it has been downloaded tens of millions of times. Additionally, cartoons, parody videos, toys and other types of merchandise have arisen from the birds-versus-swine game. And if you didn’t think the Angry Birds train was getting milked enough, Rovio is teaming up with mobile operators for “Bad Piggy Bank,” an in-app payment system directly tied with carrier billing.
Bad Piggy Bank will hit Android first, where the app is available for free, and give users the option to pay to remove ads. Users will also be able to make other in-app purchases, like the Might Eagle character, as well as other perks that Rovio will be adding over time.
This is obviously good news for the carriers since the feature is directly tied to a customer’s phone bill, and of course we all know how quickly and easily it is to make these in-app purchases or impulse buys when we become impatient.
According to mocoNews:
Bad Piggy Bank will operate on a “fixed revenue share model” but Rovio and [Finland mobile operator] Elisa do not specify what the split will be. The back-end of the service will be provided by mobile payments company Fortumo, which already works with a number of media companies and publishers on billing for their mobile services.
While this will be a nice little source of revenue for mobile operators, I’m still left wondering just how much more the developers can milk the Angry Birds game. Angry Birds has already sold 12 million copies and has totaled 30 million downloads from the free version, so it’s clearly doing pretty damn well. Adding in-app perks and new skins and levels is a nice way to keep the train going, but I’m really looking forward to the next big hit Rovio has up its sleeve. If there is one, at least.
[Via: mocoNews]