Angry Birds is huge so it comes as a surprise that it isn’t on Facebook yet. That’s all going to change on Valentine’s Day.
Speaking to Penn Olson today, Rovio revealed that they are bringing their hit Angry Birds to the more than 800 million people on Facebook. The company is planning to launch the game on the social networking service on February 14 in Jakarta, Indonesia. They decided to hold the launch there as it is a major Facebook hub.
Rovio also spoke more in depth on their plans for the Angry Birds franchise as a whole. They said that they plan to have Angry Birds pre-installed in every new Samsung Smart TV and the previous versions of their TVs will get an update that will install the game.
They also want to bring a cloud-like aspect to the game allowing players to save their progress on one device and carry it over to the next.
They also revealed that Angry Birds for Facebook will introduce power-ups that users can buy for a dollar or earn through normal gameplay. The power-ups include an earthquake, or special, bigger or stronger birds. They claim that 40 percent of their users are interested in buying the upgrades compared to three or four percent in other games.
Angry Birds on Facebook will also introduce the obvious social aspect to the game. This will include leaderboards that players can post to so their friends can try to beat them.
They also plan to release more games than it did last year. They only had Rio and Seasons in 2011. They have already released the Chinese New Year variant of Angry Birds this year.
We can’t deny that Angry Birds is a global phenomenon. It has amassed millions of downloads, but Rovio needs to launch a new IP or they risk becoming stagnant. I could be wrong and Angry Birds could become another game franchise that can release the same game every year while seeing massive returns. Only time will tell, but as of right now, Angry Birds looks like the mobile Call of Duty.