Rovio don't believe in Windows Phone (UPDATE)

A representative of the Finnish company Rovio last Friday said that the company is not going to publish Angry Birds Space on Windows Phone 7. Analysts considered this statement a serious blow to the Microsoft platform, which may well negatively affect its future. However, as it turned out later, everything is not so sad. 

It all started with the fact that in his interview with Bloomberg, Rovio representative Peter Vesterbacka called the development under WP “too big an event“: “You have to completely rewrite the application for this platform.” 

He also stated that Angry Birds Space will not be on WP, because the company has no confidence that the product will pay off, and “without much confidence in sales – porting the game to WP7 is a sure way to lose money.” 

He also noted that Microsoft’s main hope now should be the release of Windows 8, which will present developers with more opportunities, opportunities that made the success of iOS possible.   

At the moment, according to Vesterbak, the situation is as follows: “no applications – no users, no users – no applications either.” 

Richard Windsor, a mobile analyst at Nomura, called Rovio’s decision a “worrying sign” for Windows Phone, as what happened exposes the lack of trust in the platform from one of the most influential players in the market. Windsor added that it would also hit Nokia hard as one of Microsoft’s most important partners.

At the moment, the original version of Angry Birds is leading the top Windows Marketplace, but, according to the analyst, since the most successful player in the market does not consider it necessary to invest money and time in transferring his new application to the platform, this indicates that “hardly anyone can earn money in such a market at all.”

And since the future of the platform is thus called into question, then the future of the vendor (Nokia), who put everything on Windows Phone, is in great doubt.

“It’s too early to talk about this, but Rovio’s distrust of the platform may make many doubt the promising future of WP,” concludes Windsor.

It’s funny, but on the same day when Rovio announced its unwillingness to work with WP 7, it became known that Microsoft’s mobile app store grew by 10 thousand applications in three months (in December 2011 it numbered 60 thousand programs, now it is 70 thousand). 

Recall that at the moment Angry Birds Space is already present on Android, iOS, Mac and PC. 

—-UPDATE—-Rovio Executive Director Michael Hed said that Angry Birds Space on Windows Phone still be.

However, the Finnish company has not yet decided on the terms. 

As for the loud statement of Peter Vesterbak, the journalists pocketgamer.biz it is believed that it was taken out of context. In their opinion, Vesterbaka meant that angry birds would not be launched on WP during the main launch. 

This is due to the lack of native code support by the platform. Because of this, many developers are often forced to rewrite their applications in C#. As a result, many large projects on WP appear only months – if not years – after the release on iOS and Android. 

The situation is completely different with Windows 8, for which Microsoft announced native C++ support.