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Angry Birds is one of the most popular video game franchises in the history of mobile gaming, created by a Finnish developer company called Rovio Entertainment. First released in December 2009, the game quickly expanded and gained a massive user-base in less than a year, reaching over 12 million sold copies. The combination of addictive gameplay and the overly comical style was enough for the game to be as successful as it is today. Just recently, the first true sequel to the original Angry Birds was released, despite at least 10 variants of the game being launched, it wasn’t until Angry Birds 2, that a complete overhaul was made to the core game mechanics. As of today, all variants and iterations of Angry Birds are played around the whole world, but some regions do a lot better than others, which is why Rovio Entertainment is highly committed to continuously increase its prominence in Asia, after the company didn’t do so well in 2014.
Even if Rovio’s overall earnings dropped at least 73 percent in 2014, due to the lack of licensing of the once extremely popular “Angry Birds” brand, the company was still relatively present in most regions, including Asia, its strongest market, where even if the game wasn’t purchased or played as much as in previous years, it continued to generate a stable source of income. The great decline in the company’s total revenue led to around 110 jobs being cut, and a complete new strategy for the company to rebound from a rather harsh year. “(We have the) building capability to scale into parts of the world where we haven’t been strong in the past and a big part of that is actually working with partners, not trying to do everything ourselves”, Rovio’s Chief Commercial Officer Alex Lambeek stated making emphasis on the potential that Asian markets hold.
Angry Birds 2 has been downloaded almost 40 million times since its release on July 30 (from which 20 million were made in just one week) ; and due to the new marketing strategy Rovio followed with the game, almost a third of the total downloads were made in China, which is on pair with the number of downloads the original Angry Birds had in the region (nearly 1 billion out of the total 3 billion global downloads). With Angry Birds 2, Rovio partnered with a Chinese mobile gaming company called Kunlun Inc, to give Asian users what they might seek in a mobile game. Alex Lambeek stated that in order to make Angry Birds 2 as popular among Chinese users, the game was going to be tailored specifically for them, as they “want to be spoken to and listened to in their own language with their own specific humor”.