1 in 7 people on Earth now has Angry Birds.
Rovio has announced that the games in its wildly popular mobile franchise about ill-tempered avians have been downloaded a total of one billion times. I’m going to let that number sink in for a moment: one billion. 1,000,000,000. A thousand million. Last October, the United Nations estimated that the planet’s seven billionth living human had been born, to put things in perspective.
Of course, while it’s fun and slightly mindblowing to say things like “1/7th of the world’s population has downloaded Angry Birds,” we all know it’s not true. Not only does this include multiple games – Angry Birds classic, Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Rio and Angry Birds Space – this number includes downloads across the bazillion different platforms on which the game is available. I’ve personally accounted for at least four of those downloads myself.
That said, this isn’t to diminish the staggering number, either. Even if every Angry Birds player has downloaded a game in the series four times like I have, that’s still 250 million people owning one version of the game – making Angry Birds the fourth most-populous nation in the world, right ahead of Indonesia and Brazil. What’s also striking is how quickly it reached this milestone, having hit half a billion downloads back in November.
It’s the end of the 1-billion-downloads video that piques one’s interest, however – a quick split-second shot of a young boy turning and winking at the camera. In its announcement, Rovio promises that “more amazing things” are coming soon, so perhaps this is a teaser. What exactly it’s teasing I haven’t the faintest, but one wonders if Rovio can make lightning strike twice with mobile gaming success. Or maybe one billion times.
