Rovio’s Jami Laes on keeping Angry Birds in the entertainment vortex (interview)

It was easy for me to pick Jami Laes out in a crowd, even among the 150,000 attendees at the 2014 International CES tech tradeshow last week in Las Vegas. He was the guy wearing the bright red Angry Birds hoodie. And why not? Angry Birds has given his Helsinki-based company, Rovio Entertainment, a path to instant recognition.

The mobile game series has been downloaded nearly 2 billion times, and a video cartoon series has seen more than 1 billion downloads in just seven months. It falls on Laes, Rovio’s executive vice president of games, to keep this juggernaut going. Many in the game industry have questioned whether Rovio can do that, given the popularity of other mobile games that are making good headway in dethroning the birds, like Supercell’s Clash of Clans and King’s Candy Crush Saga.