Hot on the heels of Angry Birds Star Wars II, Finnish firm Rovio has announced plans for its next game.Angry Bird sGo! breaks out of the bird-hurling formula though: it's a Mario Kart-style karting game
It will be released on 11 December for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8 and BlackBerry 10 devices, making it Rovio's most ambitious cross-platform launch yet. Like Angry Birds Star Wars II, there'll be physical "Telepods" toys capable of being scanned in to the game, as well as a blitz of licensed products.
Angry Birds Go! will also be Rovio's first game "built from the ground up as a free-to-play title", with revenues coming entirely from in-app purchases and advertising. Neither is new to the Angry Birds series, but until now the game shave only been free-to-play on Android.
Here’s an interesting tag cloud from a recent survey by children’s marketing firm SuperAwesome, which asked British children what present they’d most like to unwrap on Christmas morning:
This is a big part of the potential audience for Angry Birds Go. Squint, and you’ll spot Nintendo, Pokemon and other traditional gaming brands.
These kids don’t come with preconceptions that Mario Kart is the yardstick by which all other karting games should be judged, and even if their Apple-dominated present requests turn out to be wishful thinking, they’ll be able to play Rovio’s next game on their Tesco Hudl, Amazon Kindle Fire, Argos MyTablet or whatever other device ends up in their stocking.
British telecoms regulator Ofcom’s recent Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes report claimed that 42% of British 5-15 year-olds now use a tablet, and 23% of them play games on it. That’s still less than the 60% of 5-15 year-olds using a dedicated handheld games device, but the latter percentage has fallen from 69% in 2012.
Source: theguardian
