Launch of Angry Birds on Facebook

Did you show your true love for Angry Birds yesterday on Valentine’s Day? One of the world’s most popular games can now be played on the world’s largest social network.  The Finnish mobile game developer Rovio announced that it would release a version of the game available on Facebook in Jakarta, Indonesia back on January 29^th.

The addition of the popular game may be seen as an attempt by Facebook to stay on top of its competitor Google+ which added the game to its site back in August of 2011.  This is by no means Facebook’s entrance into the world of online gaming; the site has offered successful games like Farmville, YoVille, and Mafia Wars in the past but none of these compare to the overwhelming popularity of Angry Birds.

For any readers who have never played the game (if there are any left out there), Angry Birds involves slinging birds at pigs hiding in structures.  The object of the game is to destroy all pigs in the playing field.  It seems like such a simple concept but those are the ones that usually catch the public’s attention.   A combined 500 million downloads last year across all platforms makes it the most downloadable game in the history of gaming.  A little known fact is that when developing the game, and searching for an enemy that the angry wingless birds to fight against, they drew on the “swine flu” epidemic in the news to settle on pigs.

The pairing of games and social networks has proven to be a good strategy for Facebook; they were able to reignite the popularity of the classic game Tetris by introducing apps like Tetris Battle which involves one-on-one play between players and allowing people to boast their high scores and ranking to their friends.  This pairing draws in both: players who want to try to beat a game or getting a high score, as well as those who enjoy competing against others.

For those die-hard fans who don’t think that yesterday’s release is enough for them, they can take a field trip to the unlicensed theme park in China where people can play a life-sized version of the game.