If asked to summarise the first few years of game development on smartphones, it's likely most people will come up with just two words: Angry Birds.

Though games from small, independent outfits notching up downloads in the millions is now far from a rare story, few can match the potency of the Angry Birds brand, which has gone from unknown to mainstream marvel in little over a year.

Mighty Eagle millions

Naturally, with downloads topping 50 million as of January, revenue has hardly been hard to come by for Rovio in the last 12 or so months.

In fact, speaking to Wired, the developer said the Angry Birds brand has now taken more than €50 million in total.

"We felt we had done our best game so far. But the idea always was, this is the first step," Rovio's Mikael Hed told the site.

"We thought we would need to do ten to 15 titles until we got the right one," added cousin Niklas Hed.

Given Angry Birds cost Rovio €100,000 to develop – updates including, according to Wired – that's some (potential) profit margin.

[source: Wired]