Rovio had more than just the birth of Jesus to celebrate this Christmas, as Angry Birds sold 30 million copies over the Christmas week (December 22nd to December 29nd), with 8 million of those downloaded on Christmas Day itself. With statistics suggesting that 17.4 million devices (i.e. Android or iOS tablets or smartphones) were given as Christmas presents, Rovio has made the leap to suggest that essentially half of those who received a device for Christmas downloaded Angry Birds onto it pretty much straight away.
Of course, numbers for these kinds of things can't be exact, but it's not difficult to imagine that a large proportion of people tinkering with their new gadget as they wait for Christmas dinner will have picked Angry Birds as one of their first games to buy. After all, Angry Birds was released at just the right time and to just the right reception to become pretty much synonymous with the concept of a smartphone game. As Rovio points out, Angry Birds Star Wars has stayed top of the U.S. iPhone charts since the day it came out, and Bad Piggies has been popular too.
Did you get a new device for Christmas? And if you did, did you follow the trend and download a copy of Angry Birds?
