Peter Vesterbacka at Casual Connect 2011

Peter Vesterbacka, CMO of Rovio, had stated at Casual Connect that there was real excitement when they hit the first 100 million installs, with less excitement at 200 million and then less at 300 million and so on.  I’m guessing however that a few bottles of champagne will be popped in the next few weeks when Rovio announces that Angry Birds will have surpassed a total of a billion total installs across all platforms.

The game is purposefully simple.  There are no complex instructions to read or review, and the mechanics and controls are familiar to anyone who has used a rubber band or better yet a slingshot.  All the instructions to play are shown as pictures.

Versions of the game exist on nearly all mobile platforms and already has an free HTML5 optimized version running on Chrome.  The latest update on the Chrome version allows for user logins and the use of the Mighty Eagle upgrade in the first series.

Angry Birds on Chrome

Now we can take a quick look at the Facebook version.   It looks like it’s being hosted on the Google App Infrastructure and utilizes Flash supported by the Starling Framework for GPU accelerated 2D.  It would be logical for Rovio to leverage the Google relationship since they need it for the Chrome and Android versions.

Fast Customer Acquistion

Angry Birds is a well-known property, so customers won’t need to question the application as much as something that they have never heard-of.  Further, the cost for them to manually  acquire customers should be low since all they need to do is capture user information from existing mobile users and directly contact all those customers with targeted emails pointing to the Facebook version.  Reinforce that with an application upgrade on each mobile Angry Birds game and that will send new users to the Facebook version in droves.

Add in all the typical Facebook social tools

Invitations to play, Free Gifts Inbox, and leaderboards.  These well-understood social mechanics will serve to notify existing users of the existence of the Facebook version and provide discovery to a set of users who may not have a mobile phone but may use Facebook.  Perhaps these are social game players who are now used to puzzles but not an arcade experience.

Provide the option to expand-out to a maximum window resolution for a full-screen experience

This is likely the highest-resolution, largest-size Angry Birds experience you can get.  I’m running this currently on 1920×1080, but I’m wondering if I can hack this to run across two screens to get to  3840×1080.  :)

Full Screen Angry Birds

Virtual Goods – Sell powerups

The available powerups are: Mighty Eagle, Sling Scope, Birdquake, Super Seeds, and King Sling.  At the lowest level of non-discounted pricing it’s 20 uses of a powerup for $1, so one nickel every time you want to use a powerup.  There are also bundles and volume discounts for buying higher dollar amounts.  I think this removes much of the “skill” component of earning a high score, and I’m not sure how much fun the game would be clearing it  with 1000 Mighty Eagles.

Angry Birds Powerups

How Much would you Pay for a Mighty Eagle?

The future of Angry Birds on Facebook is Ad Revenue

Talking about browser-based users of Facebook, that’s a darn good place to sell ads whether for application installs or for branding.  We already know now that the cost of customer acquisition for social games has increased significantly, so that also moves in favor of Rovio with their established brand and user base.  While advertisers will not be able to buy super-social-targeted ads, with “basic information” provided by Facebook, there are many ways to slice that data to find the most highly valued future customers.  They can then use that information to do internal yield management when doing deals with the advertisers and agencies.

I’m looking forward to hearing what happens in the next few months with Rovio and seeing the MAU’s on Angry Birds on Facebook.

I guess I had to write a response as sort of a Dear John letter

Dear MySpace,

I know we’ve had our good times in the past, but I’ve met someone new, someone who I can really connect with. It’s Facebook. it’s not just that your wardrobe is a bit garish with blinky lights and all, it’s just that Facebook is far more refined for her age, and yeah, she’s just a bit younger.

Well, it’s also about my friends. Frankly, my friends don’t want to hang out with you any longer. It seems that nobody does, except for the musicians. Sometimes I wonder if your relationships with the music industry were just a bit too friendly, but it never seemed to hurt us, and you do help me find some good tunes.

Well, I think that’s it. I think for now it is best that you delete my information and stop emailing me. I don’t know if we can be friends again, but you know where to find me if you want to connect. I also know you had some concerns about LinkedIn, but trust me, she’s just a work friend.  For Serious.

Sincerely,
Eugene

On a more serious note.  We’re hiring at Cheezburger big-time!  If you were an engineer at MySpace we know that you can kick ass with massive scale.  We would love to have you.  Cheezburger Jobs can be found HERE!