But Rovio now needs to prove it can profit beyond the success of Angry Birds. Its games business, which includes the original Angry Birds and more than a dozen spinoff titles, accounted for 79 percent of its revenue in the 12 months through June.
“They need to find a way to diversify their brand portfolio in the future,” said Atte Riikola, a research analyst at Inderes in Helsinki, Finland. “They have had problems in their history when trying to diversify, so it won’t be an easy task to do.”
The company has done a good job creating offshoots of its flagship game, like Bad Piggies and Angry Birds Match. The company has also introduced several non-Angry Birds titles in recent years, including a puzzle game called Fruit Nibblers and a game tied to the pop singer Shakira.
“The hardest part in the app market is to find the users, to get people to download your game,” said Tero Kuittinen, chief strategist at Kuuhubb, a Finnish company focused on lifestyle and mobile video game applications. “If you have a well-known intellectual property — you have something that is instantly recognizable, James Bond, ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ any kind of property like that — it helps you a lot. Why wouldn’t they leverage Angry Birds?”