Finnish people are good at many things, but there are two things that they do that gets them world attention: playing ice hockey and driving Formula 1 cars. Heikki Kovalainen, while not the best driver, at least compared to Kimi Räikkönen, is a guy that most Finns know and respect. You can’t really miss him when he’s driving either because his helment is literally an Angry Bird. The cross promotion isn’t going to stop there however. Rovio, the company that made Angry Birds, has setup a teaser website for “Angry Birds Heikki”, which is due to come out on June 18th. The site features an Angry Bird with a race track in his eyes. Does this mean that Rovio is working on a car game? We’re trying to figure out how you can combine Angry Birds with Forumla 1 and failing to come up with any sensical suggestions.
Fans of Rovio’s titles should also be aware that the Finnish company is going to release a new game called “Amazing Alex” at some point in July. It’s a physics based game, like Angry Birds, but instead of hurling birds at pigs you have to build a Rube Goldberg machine. We don’t have any more details, but the wait shouldn’t be too long. July is right around the corner.
While we’re on the topic of Rovio, they recently announced that Angry Birds has been downloaded over 1 billion times and that during 2011 they had 75.4 million Euros worth of sales. Of that, profit was 48 million Euros, or 64% of sales. To put that into some perspective, Electronic Arts, who is one of the largest game studios on the face of the planet, had $269 million worth of sales during the same time period. That’s roughly 212 million Euros, which is 2.8x what Rovio made.
Rovio is doing pretty damn good when you compare them to the big boys.