Rovio certainly doesn’t lack ambition. At a conference in Munich last month, Peter Vesterbacka, the company’s head of business development, boasted that Angry Birds was “bigger than Mickey Mouse”. He was referring to the number of times the two terms were searched for on Google, but said he intended eventually to be “larger than the brand itself”. In fact, Rovio no longer describes itself as a games developer. It sees itself as a media company focused, as Mikael puts it, on “building really strong brands” of which Angry Birds is only the first.
