Idosyncratic Rovio, the company behind the smash hit Angry Birds game, likes to do things differently. Today they live streamed a press announcement about the game’s latest achievements, which featured an indie band, The Ran.
The main announcement was about “Bad Piggy Bank”. This is an in-game payment model for Angry Birds on Android which lets users either remove the ad on the free version of the game or buy the Mighty Eagle update that’s on its way.
Bad Piggy Bank will not require credit card details, and downloads purchases instantly. It does this by charging in-app purchases to your mobile phone bill. But that’s not all.
Rovio plans to make this platform available to any other other Android developers, said Rovio’s Peter Vesterbacka. They are “not picking on Android particularly, but I think that the payment method up to now has been less than perfect,” he said on the live stream.
The Bad Piggy Bank facility launches in Finland first, with operator Elisa, and globally next year, since it requires deals to be struck with local telcos.
We called Vesterbacka and he had a few more things to add.
Angry Birds has now hit 50 million downloads and over 10 million on Android. He also confirmed Angry Birds will be coming to the PC, Mac and other gaming consoles and there will be some new things “happening online” in the new year.