Angry Birds reaches half a billion downloads

We all knew that Angry Birds has turned into some kind of unstoppable pop culture machine, but sometimes it’s easy to forget how big that machine really is. Rovio reminded us this morning, when CEO Peter Vesterbacka announced at a conference in Helisinki that their little birdy game has now surpassed 500 million downloads. 500. MILLION.

To give you some perspective, there was recently a lot of hubbub about the world population surpassing 7 billion. Throw that figure into the mix, and you quickly realize that Angry Birds has been downloaded by 1 in 14 people that walk this earth.

Ok – maybe that figure is a little skewed. If you factor in lite versions, HD versions, Angry Bird Seasons, and Angry Birds Rio, that number is going to drop pretty significantly. What would that make it?- Maybe 1 in 80 people? 1 in 90? Whatever it is, it’s still kind of staggering to think about.

Want a little more perspective? Here are few things to ponder;

• During the height of the Renaissance, when Da Vinci changed the way we think about… well, everything, there were only 500 million people in the entire world.
• The current US population is 307 million. The UK? 62 million. Canada? 34 million. Put all of that together, and it’s still fewer people than there are downloads of Angry Birds.
• If we work with those same numbers and swap out the UK’s 62 million for Mexico’s 113 million, we can safely say there are more downloads of Angry Birds than there are people in North America.
• There’s a figure floating around that predicts there have only been 110 billion people in human history to date. That means one in every 220 people who’ve ever lived account for a single download Angry Birds.
• You know those free Bibles distributed in hotel rooms by the Gideons? They’ve given out 1.5 billion of those since 1908. If they’d tucked a download code for Angry Birds in every third book, Rovio would have been just as successful.
• Launching in December 2009, Angry Birds reached the half a billion milestone in only 23 months. It took Facebook 6 and a half years to reach 500 million subscribers.

Sitting on the sidelines we keep quietly waiting for the Angry Birds bubble to burst, but every time we think it’s slowing down, something crazy like this comes along to prove that nothing can stop this juggernaut. How long do you give it before they reach a billion?

Jim Squires

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Jim Squires is the Editor-in-Chief of Gamezebo. Everything you see passes his eyes first, so we like to think of him as "the gatekeeper of cool stuff." He likes good games, great writing, and just can't say no to a hamburger. Also, he is not a bear.