Angry Birds tops 250 million downloads

Rovio's Angry Birds has crossed the arbitrary but nonetheless impressive marker of 250 million downloads across the full range of mobile platforms. That is almost as many people as there are in the continental United States. It's more than 10 times as many copies as Mario 3 ever shifted. 250 million is a lot of downloads is the point here. It kind of makes Angry Birds one of the most prolific games ever made. What is Rovio planning next for the title?

Product manager Ramine Darabiha says one of the next advances for Angry Birds is Magic, a platform upgrade that will unlock location-specific features for the title. There'll also be unlockable extras buried within Angry Birds soft toys and the like, if your phone can recognize the toys' NFC chips; and because this is a strange new frontier and nobody knows nothing about where to go next, there'll be an Angry Birds-themed cookbook with a variety of egg-based recipes in it. Because of course there will.

Above: A small selection of the Angry Birds-related doodads that are doubtless on sale near you

Of course, this being a serious website for serious gaming types to talk seriously about serious gaming issues (click herefor our catalog of things in games that look like dicks), the issue must be raised of what this means for the old “casual/hardcore” schism thing. Angry Birds sold like twelve times as many copies as Black Ops! Hardcore gaming is dead! But Angry Birds costs like a thirtieth of Black Ops' pricetag! Casual gaming is a bubble! And if all the people playing Angry Birds were putting their dubious physics skills to real-world use, surely we'd have mastered time-travel by now, right?

What do you think of Angry Birds' undeniably impressive download figures? Are you a fan of the game?

Jun 15, 2011