Angry Birds creator Rovio held a press event today from Elisa Studio in Helsinki, Finland where they made some announcements and celebrated one year since Angry Birds hit the App Store. They even had a Finnish indie rock band called ‘The Ran’ play songs about Angry Birds - check out the +45 minute video of the event - the first song in the beginning for the birds the second song at the end of the event for the pigs.

The biggest announcement is that they are going to be introducing an in-app payment system for Android developers. The system will be called “Bad Piggy Bank” and will be a ‘one-touch payment’ option for players who want to buy items in-game. The Bad Piggy Bank payment system will not require any registration or credit card entry as purchases will be charged directly to your cell phone bill. This is something that Rovio is still working out with individual cell phone service providers. The idea behind the system is so that developers can generate more money from their programs, specifically to remove ads from the free version of the Angry Birds game on Android but it will be expanded to be available for other Android app developers to use in their apps. It will be hopefully available “early next year in Canada and the US” and is already available via Elisa in Finland

“The Mighty Eagle” in-app purchase is coming soon starting with iPhone and it will allow people, amongst other things, to replay all 200 levels of the game or even skip levels. The expected cost of the it is $0.99.

The numbers breakdown of Angry Birds at its first birthday: 50 million downloads across all platforms of Angry Birds since its launch. The rate of downloads per day for Angry Birds is still increasing to the point that they are expecting to break the 100 million mark by this summer. An astonishing 200 million daily minutes of Angry Birds being played in the words of the Angry Birds team, “and that’s a lot”.

The game will be on “all platforms” including PC, Mac, online, and Facebook in the new year. These new releases will be in HD but will not have anything new that players of the game haven’t already seen before. However, the Rovio team did say there will be updates every four weeks in the new year which will be free of charge.

Tomorrow, December 11, 2024 is also the first “Angry Birds Day” with meetups happening all over the world to celebrate it. The top 10 meetups’ cities will be included in the game.

And yes, you will be able to buy that hoodie he’s wearing in the screen capture picture above.

For More

Watch the video of the Angry Birds Press Event (+45 minutes long) [LINK]

Angry Birds Day Meetup.com Page [LINK]

Angry Birds for Android from GetJar [LINK] in the App Store [LINK]

Angry Birds/Rovio Mobile in the Ovi Store [LINK]