HELSINKI — Rovio Entertainment, the maker of “Angry Birds,” will be hoping to prove it’s no one-hit wonder when it launches “Bad Piggies” on Thursday, just as players seem to be tiring of the game they’ve been addicted to for the past three years.
The new game will feature pigs that strike back at the birds who attacked them with slingshots in “Angry Birds.”
A hit on app stores would give the Fin-nish company a boost as it looks to a possible stock-market flotation next year. Some analysts put its market value at between $6 billion and $9 billion, nearly on a par with another top Finnish tech name, phonemaker Nokia Oyj.
Rovio was founded in 2003 and became a global phenomenon after it launched “Angry Birds” for Apple’s iPhone in late 2009.
The highly addictive game helped Rovio’s sales jump tenfold to $100 million last year, a fraction of the $50.2 billion that Nokia chalked up.
It has remained at the top of gaming charts, with more than 1 billion downloads, and had 200 million monthly users at the end of 2011.
