Rovio's Angry Birds may have taken the mobile market by storm and embedded itself in the consumer psyche, but it has been whispered that, despite CMO Peter Vesterbacka talking up a potential $1 billion deal target, numbers of players of the first version of its seminal franchise may have crested the wave.

However, an announcement from Rovio has revealed that the game is now halfway towards its lofty target of 1 billion players by 2014, with a total number of 500 million downloads.

Bird flew

As part of the video which accompanied the announcement some other interesting stats were also revealed.

At 50,000,000 downloads, 400 billion birds had been cataputed, while at 100 million downloads, 44 billion stars had been collected.

At 210 million downloads, 200,000 collective years had been wasted played.

Rovio will also be opening a merchandise shop in locations such as Helsinki, after Vesterbacka revealed his company's intention to fight non-licensed merchandise sales globally by opening stores in China.