Rovio launched Angry Birds Space yesterday on a number of platforms. Among the omissions was Microsoft’s Windows Phone (and RIM’s BlackBerry) operating system. Peter Vesterbacka, the company’s chief marketing officer, yesterday said in an interview that it boils down to a matter of development costs and effort. “If you look at activations, Apple’s iOS and Android are clearly bigger than any other platform,” he explained. “We want to be on all screens, but we have to consider the cost of supplying the smaller platforms. With Windows Phone it’s a lot of work to technically support it.”
The original version of Angry Birds is currently the best-selling Windows Phone app. Microsoft helped Rovio port this version and a similar arrangement may be needed again if Microsoft wants to ensure that Rovio can offer its latest game to Windows Phone users.
The Angry Birds franchise is nearing the billion cumulative downloads milestone. Vesterbacka also thinks that they could top 2 billion downloads by the end of the year.
Rovio also plans to introduce four more Angry Birds games by the end of the year.
Update: Rovio CEO Mikael Hed has contradicted his marketing officer. In a statement to Reuters, Hed said, “We are working towards getting Angry Birds Space to WP7.” No timeline was given.
Read more: Bloomberg