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With 263 million MAUs, Rovio is poised to take Zynga's crown as world's most popular games outfit

End of an era, start of another

With 263 million MAUs, Rovio is poised to take Zynga's crown as world's most popular games outfit
The scale of mobile success just got bigger.

Following from the news that Rovio had over 30 million games downloaded during the Christmas week, the Finnish giant has now announced its monthly active user base during December hit a record 263 million.

This is up from around 200 million MAUs in October.

They're spread across the more than one billion games it's had downloaded on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and various other web, Facebook, PC and console platforms.

Actually, it announced one billion downloads in May 2012, so it's probably 1.5 billion now, but who counts the odd half billion these days?

Slip sliding away

The only other games company that can compete on that scale is Zynga.

Despite its troubles in 2012, it continued to rule the industry in terms of DAUs and MAUs: according to AppData, it had 271 million monthly active users on 28 December.

However, that figure was down 23 million compared to the 293 million MAUs recorded on 7 December, suggesting that at this rate Rovio will have overtaken the fast-sinking Facebook publisher sometime in January.
Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.