(RTV) - As the company behind the successful Angry Birds game prepare to launch a new game, they say the secret behind their success is "exceptionally" good games and a strong brand.
Rovio Entertainment, the maker of the world famous Angry Birds games, will launch their new game - Bad Piggies - later this week.
The company hopes to build a second major franchise from the Bad Piggies to prove it is more than a one-hit wonder.
The first game where Bad Piggies will become central figures will hit app stores on Thursday (September 27) at a crucial time for the company which has seen revenues from its previous two major games tumbling quickly.
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 United States dollars, roughly on par with struggling cross-town phone maker Nokia.
Rovio, founded in 2003, became a global phenomenon after it launched Angry Birds for Apple iPhone in late 2009.
Since the launch of Angry Birds, the Finish company has focused on turning out sequels of the original hit and earlier this year the company also launched Amazing Alex, a physics-based game that features challenges that curious boy Alex has to solve.
But the new game to be launched on Thursday (September 27) - Bad Piggies - will focus on the pigs from Angry Birds.
The Head of Game Developing at Rovio, Petri Jarvilehto, promised a unique gaming experience.
"It's an entirely new, completely unique game play experience. We've approached game play this time around from a very different angle. "Angry birds" games are essentially like you're shooting birds with a sling shot and the way we see the birds destroy things whereas the pigs they are the builders. So this is a game that's completely based around the concept of the pigs building things - they see delicious eggs and start heading that way and start building all kinds of devices to reach their goal," he said.
He said they could not live on the success of Angry Birds and that it was imperative to have a good game in order to be successful.
"If we do the launch right then we believe that we should be in a very good position in the app-stores world wide. At the same time that's only if you have a really, really good game. In today's world launching bad games doesn't make sense at all because the fans will - well, first of all, we're here to create fantastic entertainment for our fans so we wouldn't want to do it to begin with but at the same time information travels so fast that if you put out a bad game everyone's going to find out about it really quickly so with every launch we do we try to always, always make sure that we have an exceptionally good game to work with," Jarvilehto said.
Jarvilehto also said the Angry Birds' strong brand was a key to its success.
"What we have been doing with "Angry Birds" is we have been consistently building "Angry Birds" as a brand, much stronger than the game itself. We've been pushing, for us the big thing about Angry Birds is not necessarily the sling shot game, it's the characters, the universe, it is everything that we can create with those fantastic little birds or fantastic little pigs and that I think is a crucial difference in mind set in terms of how we've approached this," he said.
He also said what made the game so popular was that the characters were approachable.
"I think they are extremely approachable, if there would be funny birds nobody would care. The fact that they are angry birds that alone creates an easily approachable, an easy emotional attachment. Then some of the parameters we work with, those are so simplified, that they are actually become with enough repetition, they become iconic. That is a huge asset in terms of creating characters that people remember and people can focus on," he said.
Rovio has expanded its brand to toys and playgrounds and is taking the birds to the big screen.
Consumer products, which includes merchandising and licensing, generated around 30 per cent of revenues last year.
But Jarvilehto said the games remained at the core of their business.
"Games are very much at the core of what we do, still we are diversified over we're having seen incredible growth on other areas as well, but games are very much the central part that around we build everything else," he said.
