If a big brand gets born out of it, that’s great. The goal is create great entertainment for fans who love great games. Are we going to create another IP like Angry Birds? I hope so, but that’s not necessarily the goal here. We established our London studio to create mobile MMOs under non-Angry Birds brands. It’s really important for us to build new business catering to new fans outside of where we are at the moment. We’re going to release Battle Bay, a new IP by the creators of Angry Birds, this year. It was our number four top game last year. We did a lot of performance marketing on it. We created Nibblers, and it did really well as a mobile game last year. Hopefully there will be more, but we haven’t seen one yet. There’s only one blockbuster movie based on a mobile game. How many Angry Birds has the mobile game industry seen so far? Not that many. When we look from a games point of view at new IPs, we can’t set the goal of creating a new Angry Birds. It hits age segments in an interesting way. I say this with the most humility that I can, but it’s a fact that it’s very well-known across the globe. Often we’ve been asked, and we’ve asked ourselves, could we do that again? Not many brands out there, from a global standpoint, have the level of brand awareness that Angry Birds has. What happened with Angry Birds is quite unique. Taht: I guess I’ll go the long route on this one, because otherwise some details get lost along the way. Levoranta: There’s definitely thinking there, especially on the game side. GB: What’s some of the thinking for diversifying beyond Angry Birds? We’re still in consumer products licensing with more than 300 partners in our network. We’re opening this spring, or at the beginning of summer, a new location-based activity park in Doha, both indoor and outdoor with an Angry Birds theme. Levoranta: It’s definitely part of our business, still. GB: As far as theme parks, merchandise, other entertainment, is that still a big part of Rovio, or is that getting less emphasis in the future? Taht: Separate company, separate destiny, separate mission, separate vision. Levoranta: We’re definitely focusing in, very much. What was some of the thinking there? Is Rovio narrowing down its focus? Kati Levoranta: Most of the movie revenue will come in this year, 2017-2018. GB: The movie revenue, is it materializing just yet? Do you have more coming in? Both through scale and through KPI (key performance indicators) improvements. Taht: Right, accelerating through live operations and through user acquisition. GB: Some of the games are holding up, and even accelerating. I don’t want to make many forward-looking statements here, but the upswing and the growth happened across the year. It’s a gradual upswing throughout the year, which happened in our top performing games in the portfolio. This industry is all about sweating the details, all about running the marathon every day. If you look at the turnaround from a more micro level, an individual game level, it was by no means one silver bullet. Then it clicked, I guess, is the way to capture what then happened in 2016. We made changes in the organization, both in 20, to lead to an increased focus in 2016. Wilhelm Taht: Last year’s success is by no means a result of last year alone. How long before one of your games really turned the corner? I wonder how long the whole turnaround was in the making.
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