The Angry Birds bandwagon shows no sign of rolling off the tracks. If anything, it’s speeding up.

The games’ developer Rovio has announced that across all its titles it had 263m monthly active users in December, up from 200m at the end of 2011.

The 263m figure may well rise sharply in January, given that Rovio’s games were downloaded 30m times over Christmas week 2012.

Rovio has revealed that its Angry Birds games were downloaded more than 8m times on Christmas Day alone, with 30m downloads over the Christmas week. The company said that this 8m figure was equivalent to roughly one download for every two new smartphones and tablets unwrapped on December 25.

Rovio has taken its hit Angry Birds Star Wars game to Facebook, with new power ups, tournaments and the usual range of social features. Key to the game’s Facebook release is the addition of five new levels every week, while the Facebook app also includes three exclusive new power ups: Blaster Droid, Saber Sling and Thermal Detonator. As with Angry Birds Friends, the first Angry Birds app on Facebook, Angry Birds Star Wars lets gamers cooperate with or compete against their friends, sending in-game gifts or battling it out to top the leaderboard.

It’s fair to say that Angry Birds Star Wars has lived up to expectations so far, storming its way to the top of the App Store paid chart in less than four hours. Now Rovio has added 20 new free levels as the game moves into The Empire Strikes Back Territory. The 20 new levels take place on the remote ice world of Hoth, mirroring the opening scenes of the second Star Wars film (aka Episode V) and including the AT-AT vehicles that featured so prominently there. The new levels also mark the first appearance of the Pink Bird as Princess Leia.

Boomlagoon, a new games studio from three former Angry Bird developers, is expected to launch its first game imminently after securing backing from Finnish investor Jari Ovaskainen and London Venture Partners. Boomlagoon was founded in April 2012 by Antti Stén, who has worked for Digital Chocolate and Angry Birds developer Rovio, Tuomas Erikoinen, who was responsible for Angry Birds’ visuals, and Ilkka Halila, formerly lead programmer at Rovio. It is headquartered in Helsinki and describes itself as “a mobile game developer focused on making convivial and intriguing games for the global mobile sector”.

Well, they would, you might scoff. But remember how the wider games and mobile industries also scoffed when the Finnish firm was setting its sights on 100m Angry Birds downloads a couple of years ago?

More than one billion downloads later, the company has earned the right to serious consideration of its grand ambitions.

“We announced 30m DAU at one point, but that was ages ago. We want to be the first entertainment brand with one billion fans every day, watching animations, using our services,” marketing boss Peter Vesterbacka told the Slush conference yesterday.

“People think of the one company people use day, which is Coca Cola, and that’s just a soft drink. So it should be straightforward for us to get to one billion fans every day in the next two to three years.”

Another interesting point from the conference: Rovio now has more daily active Angry Birds users in China than it does in the US, making China its biggest market in terms of DAUs, if not (yet) in revenues.

30% of Rovio’s revenues come from physical goods – plush toys and other spin-offs – rather than sales of its Angry Birds games. But the company is hoping for a more even split in the years ahead.

“In a few years, more than half of our business will be physical,” Rovio’s marketing boss Peter Vesterbacka tells All Things Digital. “We are looking at food, drinks, stuff that you will use everyday… Again, people think that we are crazy.”

In a separate interview with VentureBeat, Vesterbacka talks about Rovio’s plans for 2013 game releases – “we’ll probably do four, maybe five” – and addresses a question about the relative sluggishness of sales for Amazing Alex, Rovio’s first non-Angry Birds game since its main franchise took off.
“We have more downloads than we did for the original Angry Birds at this point. So everything is relative,” says Vesterbacka.

“If you look at Rovio, you could say Angry Birds is our Coke, but we’ll keep doing Sprite and Fanta. Angry Birds is our main brand, but it’s OK to do smaller things. Smaller for us can still be tens of millions.”

Well, that was quick. Less than four hours after its release (at the time of writing), Angry Birds Star Wars was the top paid app on Apple’s App Store in the UK, and the fourth on its Top Grossing chart.

The game, which is the result of a high-profile partnership between Rovio and Lucasfilm, was released this morning for iOS, Android and Windows Phone, with separate PC and Mac versions also available.
Its pricing strategy varies by platform: 69p for iPhone, £1.99 for iPad, a choice of free ad-funded or £1.99 premium for Android, and 79p for Windows Phone. It’s the most high-profile game yet to get a simultaneous release across Apple, Google and Microsoft’s mobile stores.

Rovio is also using in-app purchases to make money from the app. 80 levels across two worlds are included in the initial download, with players able to pay £1.49 for another 40 levels. The company’s Mighty Eagle power-up has also been reworked as the Mighty (Millennium) Falcon, which can be replenished with further in-app purchases.

Rest assured that there is also a full range of spin-off merchandise available…

Rovio has released a new video trailer for its Angry Birds Star War game showing off more characters and game play, ahead of the game’s release later this week. The video, billed as the “official game play trailer”, gives the most in-depth idea yet of what the game will contain, with more than one minute of actual gaming footage. Most of the film series’ most-loved characters are involved – from Han Solo to R2-D2 – and each has its own special method of attack: Han uses a blaster, for example, Luke Skywalker a lightsaber and Chewbacca is, well, very large. The game is released on November 8.