Discusses Android changes, has hopes for Nokia

Peter Vesterbacka of Rovio, makers of the incredibly popular Angry Birds and other iOS games, has offered some thoughts on the App Store, Android, Nokia and some of the secrets of Rovio's success in a new interview with Tech n' Marketing. Among other insights, he solves the mystery of why Angry Birds for Android is a free, ad-supported app: "Paid content just doesn't work on Android."

By any measure, Angry Birds has done extremely well: over one million downloads per day during the holiday season, according to the company, to add to the existing 50 million users who play the game for a cumulative 200 million minutes per day. The company, based in Finland, saw the game go to number one in its homeland first, followed by Sweden, and by spring of 2010 it was the top game in the US and UK, followed quickly by 75 other countries. It has been a top seller ever since, rarely displaced from the top spot at the App Store.

Its only serious challenger of late has been another game called Cut the Rope, which also relies on cute characters and a physics engine but otherwise takes a different tack. "It's a great game," Vesterbacka said, "and deserves all the success it has had." He went on to add, however, that Angry Birds continues to outsell it except for a two-week period after Cut the Rope's launch.

Vesterbacka praised Apple's App Store as a platform that will continue to dominate the industry: "Apple will be the number one platform for a long time from a developer perspective, they have gotten so many things right. And they know what they are doing and they call the shots. Android is growing, but it’s also growing complexity at the same time."

When Angry Birds was being developed for Android, the company had to face what Vesterbacka calls "the fragmentation of the ecosystem." When asked specifically about Apple CEO Steve Jobs' criticisms of Android, he largely agreed: "So many different shops, so many different models. The carriers messing with the experience again. Open but not really open, a very Google-centric ecosystem. And paid content just doesn’t work on Android."

"Steve is absolutely right when he says that there are more challenges for developers when working with Android," Vesterbacka continued. "but that’s fine. Developers will figure out how to work any given ecosystem -- as long as it doesn’t cause physical pain, it’s ok. Nobody else will be able to build what Apple has built, there just isn’t that kind of market power out there."

"That doesn’t mean that model is superior, it’s just important to understand that Apple is Apple and Google is Google. Different," he explained, "and developers need to understand that. Different business models for different ecosystems. And [I] wouldn’t forget about Nokia and MeeGo either, new leadership always tends to shake things up and create opportunity. And HP-Palm. And RIM. And even Microsoft. It’s a fragmented world,” Vesterbacka said.

While maintaining that "device fragmentation" wasn't really an issue, the company eventually decided to make several changes to accommodate the Android market. The initial change was to make the game available only on certain models that could handle what Rovio felt were the minimum requirements of the game as it was, leaving out some 30 Android phones including some brand-new models at the time. Later, the company released simplified versions that could run on the models originally left out.

The second decision was to make the game free but ad-supported on the Android platform. When asked to clarify their decision to go with an ad-supported model on the platform, Vesterbacka explained that "free is the way to go with Android. Nobody has been successful selling content on Android. We will offer a way to remove the ads by paying for the app, but we don’t expect that to be a huge revenue stream." The company has previously said that they make about $1 million per month in advertising from the Android platform, and Vesterbacka mentioned that so far the Android version has been downloaded about 15 million times.

As for the success of the app, he is quick to credit the fans for word of mouth, as well as characters designer Jaakko Iisalo had come up with before game development started. Rovio, which had been developing games for other companies since 2003, decided the characters warranted their own game and the rest is history. Vesterbacka said the game's early success was due to its having been optimized for touch from the beginning, along with memorable characters (which have now spawned a line of toys and other merchandising the company plays to invest more heavily in over the coming year).

He is of course happy with the game's success so far, and is hopeful that it can expand to other mobile platforms as well. Vesterbacka particularly expressed some optimism for Nokia's Ovi platform as well as the MeeGo experiment, and called Palm's WebOS "a really cool OS and [it] has been a pleasure developing for that one, but the volume is irrelevant for the time being."

When asked to name the first five steps a developer should take to following in Rovio's success, Vesterbacka had only two: "1. Create a great app. 2. Get the message out." [via Tech n' Marketing]

By Electronista Staff