The first non-Angry Birds game in more than two years from Rovio Entertainment
hit No. 1 on download charts on Thursday, showing the Finnish startup behind the
world-famous gaming franchise was more than a one-hit wonder.
Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds games - in which players use a slingshot to
attack pigs who steal the birds' eggs - has been valued by analysts at $6
billion to $9 billion, roughly on par with struggling cross-town phone maker
Nokia.
Rovio's new puzzle game, Amazing Alex, became the No 1 paid app on the key
United States app store shortly after the launch. Amazing Alex is a
physics-based game that features challenges that curious boy Alex has to
solve.
"Launching new franchises has turned out to be tough for even the most
successful app vendors, but Amazing Alex reached the Number One position in the
iPhone Paid App chart in eight hours," said analyst Tero Kuittinen from Finnish
mobile firm Alekstra.
"This is the fastest time to hit the Number One position in America - without
help from being a sequel, a movie tie-in or an extension of an existing
brand."
Rovio, founded in 2003, became a global phenomenon after it launched Angry
Birds for Apple Inc's
iPhone in late 2009 and has since focused on turning out sequels of the original
hit.
This has helped it to remain at the top of gaming charts, with more than a
billion downloads, and it had 200 million monthly users at the end of 2011,
compared with U.S.-based Zynga Inc's
240 million.
Rovio's sales jumped 10-fold to $100 million last year as gamers flocked to
download its titles and the firm has said it was considering going
public.
Last year, Rovio raised $42 million from venture capital firms, including
Accel Partners, which previously backed Facebook and Baidu, and Skype founder
Niklas Zennstroem's venture capital firm, Atomico Ventures.
Nokia shares closed at 1.548 euros on Thursday, valuing the company at 5.8
billion euros.
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