Peter Vesterbacka on the 200 million Angry Bird audience

yeah so it's very interesting to see the big numbers so like the the slide with the seven billion uh a lot so uh just shows that we still have a few people out there that we haven't reached uh but yeah so uh if you look at rovio and what we've been doing and been up to for the last uh four years we now have more than two billion copies of angry birds out there uh and i always kind of refer to that as a good start and two billion of course is much more than anybody could uh kind of dream of i thought i was like super ambitious when i said uh you know back in 2010 that okay we're gonna have a hundred million downloads for angry birds everybody at rovio thought i was crazy and of course uh outside of your even more so

um because 100 million i mean that was like totally unheard of we're told that hey you know like only tetris has done that and it took them like 20 years and we also talked to the guys you know like uh distributing tetris and all of that and they they kind of like told us that like hey you guys are are like insane can't be done and uh and even if you come like if you go and buy you know the guinness book of world records okay the latest ones they've like fixed it but even like uh two years ago they're still you know saying that okay biggest game ever tetris hundred million copies and uh now when you look back if somebody will tell you that you know like we're gonna have 100 million downloads for a game oh yeah it's it's you know slightly ambitious but uh you know it's it's kind of reasonable you can do that so i think that it's very very important to keep in mind that four years ago if you said 100 million you know people thought you were insane

today when you say 100 million you know like no big deal and and yeah as i said we have now 2 billion over 2 billion copies of angry birds out there and i think that the download numbers of course are like no big deal because that doesn't really tell you anything about the engagement and all of that but if you look at uh you know how many people uh play angry birds you know every day every month i mean we still have uh way or 200 million people that play angry birds every month so it's it's kind of like the size of the twitter audience you know all of twitter so uh it's pretty big if you can like then start comparing games to some of those supposedly like big social networks but of course i mean we're still much more than facebook so we need to work on that but i think that one thing that is is really uh happening uh and if you look at our industry okay so just heard that uh candy crush has uh half a billion installs so you know good start

uh but uh i think that uh uh really moving towards uh brands becoming super super important because as we all know uh it's very crowded out there you know for every angry birds there are many many there are hundreds of thousands not so angry birds not so successful games and i and totally agree with tommy there that i mean it's again if you're if you're serious about making games you have to be very very serious about marketing very serious about branding and if you look at uh what we've been doing at rovio so of course we started as a games company we started as a mobile games company 10 years ago we actually made 51 games before angry birds so we know uh very very well how tough it is to create a hit game and i would argue that it hasn't gotten any easier i mean it's got an

even more crowded and like any other market out there uh you know it's it's um it's not easy to stand out of the crowd and i think this is also something that if you look at you know take more mature markets take for example you know soft drinks you know if i would you know like stand up here and okay i just like had this great idea i'm gonna start a soft drink company and i'm gonna take on coke you know it's like good luck with that and and i think that there's nobody like in their right mind you know would think okay i'm gonna go out there and i'm gonna build a brand like cook and i'm gonna take them down and i think that it's very interesting that we have people in games who think okay yeah we're you know like i'm gonna make this game and i'm gonna uh you know go out there and build the biggest brand on the planet the interesting thing is that in games and with digital distribution you can do that with angry birds we actually built the fastest growing brand ever so uh we collected some some studies we

asked you know people in the u.s uh so it turns out that nine out of 10 people in the u.s know the brand of angry birds 93 percent of the population of china knows the brand and you know just a very nice experience last year i was at the mobile world congress in uh barcelona and i was staying at the same hotel i guess you know samsung or somebody had like booked all their executives into that hotel so me and a bunch of korean people and then one of the days like in the morning i was walking across you know the lobby and then there's this maybe 60 some years old korean gentleman walks towards me and okay i'm always wearing my red hoodie so again you know about the brand so then this guy doesn't

speak much english so when he comes closer his you know big smile on his face and what does he do he goes like this so playing angry birds in the air so it's like super exciting to see that yeah we're building a brand but we're like creating language you know so people immediately recognize that you know what is the guy doing yeah he's playing angry birds so i thought that was like a pretty cool and another example of uh like then power of the brand uh one of my friends actually works at samsung uh his day job and he has startup making some solar power like solutions for africa and uh he was uh on a trip to to africa and to mozambique and they went to a little village like deep in in the countryside and then there's like a tiny little village door and what does he see on the wall of that store

huge ad for coke you know another red great red brand and right next to that coke ad that i'm sure coke paid for one of our fans had painted a huge red bird so deep in africa in this little village coke and angry birds so uh you know what i'm saying here is that brand will become more and more important right now if you look at what is happening with collect user acquisition costs and all of that skyrocketing it's becoming very very tough out there you just saw the list of you know the few companies that can actually afford to do that and it's getting smaller and smaller so okay what we are doing is that we are building angry birds not for a hundred days but for a hundred years so we're kind of

off to a good start but it's only the beginning so you know two billion downloads scale become a few billion more but it's really all about establishing the brand there okay mario that chris was mentioning of course great role model for anybody in games nintendo has been building mario games for almost 30 years now or then if you look at some other like exciting uh you know companies and characters again out of japan you know our good friend hello kitty 40 years this year 40 years and if you look at you know some other well-known characters mickey mouse mickey mouse was launched through a black and white cartoon in 1928 and guess what that company now is building theme parks who would have believed on all continents and if you look at rovia 2009 11th of december to be exact

we launched our angry birds brand or angry birds characters through a little game on the iphone now 45 percent of our business latest numbers are announced physical products consumer products toys soft drinks we're actually giving coke a good run for their money in a lot of markets so it can be done in soft drinks uh we have tens of thousands of physical consumer products out there all continents we have have angry birds activity parks on all continents we actually have two of our angry birds activity parks in the u.s one in houston and one in in florida on the nasa premises so we build parks together with nasa we launch a game in space again you know things that sound crazy at first

but it can be done last summer we took over the red square in moscow i was told that it can't be done it's like a holy place we took over the whole red square we branded it angry birds we threw a party for 40 000 people then some of my russian friends came there and then they told me that you know now peter now we believe that you guys can do anything and okay we didn't stop there we also threw a party for 6 000 students at the kremlin you know like putin's house it's a little bit like you know throwing a picnic at uh the white house with obama uh so so i think that uh what i'm saying here is that what started as a little game with a few downloads has grown into a major brand major franchise we're actually now in the top 10 of all licensed brands of course our friends at disney are still way ahead of us but our trajectory looks a little bit better so

all about brand we're off to a good start but i think that it's again you can really do anything it's it there's no reason why you can't build a massive brand starting with all game just like you could do that in 1928 with a black and white cartoon about the little moss so uh again it's a good start but we're only getting started thanks