The Angry Birds franchise has hurtled past a billion downloads. The number covers free and paid downloads of Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Rio and Angry Birds Space. The news comes a couple days after Rovio revealed revenues of $106.3 million in 2011, with approximately $67.6 million in pre-tax profit.

There's one curiosity in today's video announcing the milestone: the closing moments highlight physics-based Rube Goldberg puzzler Casey's Contraptions. As Gamasutra notes, Rovio has not officially purchased Snappy Touch or Mystery Coconut, the developers of the game. The connection between Rovio and the Casey's Contraptions team is currently unclear.

If you've been waiting to check out Remedy's successful racer, Death Rally, now is probably the time to do it. The car-combat title is currently free on the Apple App Store. It's only free for "a limited time" however, so get it while the gettin's good.

Remedy is also giving away an iPad via the Death Rally Facebook page. To enter the giveaway, users have to simply "like" Death Rally on Facebook. You should probably actually try the game first, of course. Not that we're suggesting anyone would ever "like" something dishonestly.

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Causing mass destruction is easily the best part of Prototype 2, and a new batch of DLC should help you do that with a little more panache. The "Colossal Mayhem" pack adds a number of new goodies, including a "Thermobaric Boom-Stick" weapon and a number of new powers and skins for Heller, the game's protagonist. The pack is available now for $5 on PSN and Xbox Live.

The next round of DLC, available May 29, has already been announced as well. The "Excessive Force" pack will include a "Viral Infector" grenade launcher and yet more powers and skins. It will also sell for $5.

In other Prototype 2 news, a companion app has been released for Android and iOS. The app allows users to keep track of achievements and in-game collectible thanks to some handy maps that have all collectibles marked. The app itself is free, though it only includes one map, the Yellow Zone. The remaining two maps can be purchased for $2.

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Yesterday, Wolfenstein 3D was a measly 19 years and 364 days old. Puh-shaw, we say. Today, however, the game is a full 20 years old, and id Software is throwing the classic FPS a celebration. Rather than sending all the game's fans party hats and individual slices of cake, though, id's ported Wolf 3D to web browsers, making it totally free!

But perhaps you're not around a computer at the moment, and you'd prefer to play on the go? id's got that covered too, making the iOS port of Wolfenstein 3D free for today only (the iTunes page still reflects a $1.99 price as of this writing, but Bethesda says it'll flip to free "later today").

Or maybe you've already played Wolf 3D more than you'll ever need to? Creator John Carmack recorded a director commentary aimed at superfans of the series, which we've embedded just below the break. Let us know if he talks about rockets at all!

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Before there was, uh, that other game called Alien Hominid (and Castle Crashers), there was the original Alien Hominid, a free browser run-and-gun game that debuted on Newgrounds. And that original game has now surpassed 20 million play sessions, The Behemoth has announced.

The brain child of Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin, Alien Hominid was built in Flash and released on Newgrounds way back in 2002. It would eventually be ported to the GameCube and PS2 in 2004 (and Europe would see Xbox and GameBoy Advance ports), then to Xbox Live Arcade in 2007. Currently, The Behemoth is working on Battleblock Theater.

Despite their occasional protests to the contrary, both Nintendo and Sony have seen the pervasive mobile market take chunks of the portable gaming industry. The mobile app space burgeoned as game developers undercut each other constantly, in a race toward 99 cents that set a buck as the de facto price point for the new marketplace. This, in turn, made a massive price disparity between mobile games and their handheld competition, which tends to retail for much more. Why buy a $30 DS game, when you can buy 30 games for the same price?

However, we're now seeing yet another race all the way to the bottom: free. Even as the PC space is largely adopting a free-to-play, microtransaction-driven business model, the shift is similarly occurring in the mobile market. Recent F2P hits have started a run of similar titles, with some paid apps adopting a free-to-play option.

The change began subtly. Rovio's breakout hit Angry Birds may have stuck near the top of the Top Paid Apps charts, but the Top Grossing arena was ruled by little blue men early last year. Smurfs Village spent months as the Top Grossing app, no doubt bolstered by co-marketing for the then-upcoming film. Still, the free app had an inviting price point, and even a few 99 cent purchases per user would easily push it above the revenue for a one-time dollar fee. Then, Tiny Tower became the talk of the iOS App Store blogosphere, using a similar model inspired by social gaming on Facebook, even garnering recognition as Apple's official Game of the Year.

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GREE founder Yoshikazu Tanaka lost about $700 million over the past two days when shares of GREE plunged 23.3 percent on Monday, then another 0.1 percent today. The rapid decline was caused by a Yomiuri report stating that Japan's Consumer Affairs Agency was considering regulating the Japanese social games industry.

The aspect of Japanese social games that the agency is rumored to disapprove of is the "complete gacha" style of microtransaction, in which players pay for randomized items, earning additional in-game rewards for completing a set. This could be construed as a form of lottery, which is illegal as a sales incentive in Japan.

GREE officially declined to comment to the Wall Street Journal about the potential impact of a ban on these microtransactions, noting that there were other ways to build revenue. However, we suspect Tanaka himself has a different view on the potential financial impact, having already seen it happen. GREE and other social gaming companies have announced plans to self-regulate their games, creating industry guidelines and imposing spending caps.

This (what's the opposite of a windfall?) happened just a week after GREE announced its purchase of Funzio, developer of social games including Crime City.

A new update for Skylanders Cloud Patrol, the arcade shooting gallery tie-in for iOS, is available for download right now. The biggest feature of this new update is Retina Display support for the latest iPad.

The other major feature of this update is allowing more Skylanders. Activision specifically calls out "Warnado, Wham-Shell, Camo and all of the Legendary Skylanders collection" in the update notes, though the full list of now-supported Skylanders is something we're trying to track down right now.

Out of the variety of numbers included in this morning's Rovio 2011 financial report, one line stuck out to us as particularly insane: the employee count. Rovio wasn't a very large company before Angry Birds exploded in late 2009, having only produced a couple dozen under-the-radar mobile titles. But by 2011, the need for expansion was clearly there.

Resultantly, employee numbers similarly exploded – from just 28 employees in early 2011 to a whopping 224 at year's end. In case that isn't a dramatic enough statement unto itself, Valve Software employs 293 people, and Valve has quite a few more things to manage. Our biggest fear – a fear that many Rovio employees likely echo – is that the massive upscaling of jobs will result in a massive downscaling should the Angry Birds franchise lose its foothold as king of mobile distractions. Not exactly a new business model in the game industry, unfortunately.

For now at least, Rovio's employing a ton of Finnish devs to craft its bird flingers and related products. Someone's gotta think of these clever marketing vices, you know!

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Andreas Illiger, creator of iOS sensation, Tiny Wings, is on the verge of releasing his next game. The project should be finished "in less than three weeks," Illiger has told Flow Studio. Unfortunately, that's about all we know. Illiger noted that the game will be for iOS but, "otherwise it's a big secret, I am not telling anything to anyone."

Regarding the development of Tiny Wings, Illiger noted that he wanted to create a positive game about the dream of flying. "There are many destructive and negative games," said Illiger, "so I wanted to figure out if it is possible to make a game which makes you feel happy." Dude, mission accomplished.

[Thanks, Sarah!]

The Angry Birds are quite a catch, it seems. Franchise creator Rovio announced this morning that earnings in 2011 topped $100 million, which it owes solely to sales of the Angry Birds franchise. "The heavy investments made in 2011 to all business areas will be seen in future products," Rovio CEO Mikael Hed noted in the press release. "To ensure continuous success we need to be creative and stay focused on entertaining our millions of fans by continuously developing new and innovative products and services." The company earned approximately $67.6 million in pre-tax profit in 2011, or about 64 percent of total revenue.

Hed doesn't necessarily mean branching out from his company's most popular franchise, of course. Especially not after such a big year for merchandising surrounding the Angry Birds – Rovio's "consumer products" unit took in "about 30 percent" of 2011's total earnings (approximately $31.9 million). That's a lot of Angry Birds gummy snacks!

Rovio's $106.3 million in revenue (not profit, mind you, but revenue) is owed primarily to growth in the Finnish company's Angry Birds games catalog, which expanded by just one game in 2011: a movie tie-in named "Angry Birds Rio." The games have been downloaded approximately 648 million times across all platforms as of Dec. 31, 2011, and have a monthly user base of approximately 200 million.

[Image credit: Flickr user 'Nearsoft']

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The studio developing the licensed remake of Battle Chess has begun a Kickstarter to fund a full featured multiplayer system for the title before its launch later this year. Expected to launch last year, Subdued Software, which received no funding from Battle Chess rights holder Interplay, has been working on the project between contracts.

"The Kickstarter will allow us to focus and finish the game," Subdued Software President Mike Terlecki told Joystiq. "If we get the funding we're looking at a September launch window."

The company's Kickstarter is seeking $100,000 for an online experience that'll include "skilled based matchmaking, statistics, leaderboards, achievements and in-game chat." The company also learned a lesson from the Star Command Kickstarter, factoring the cost of fulfilling rewards and running this campaign.

"We have carefully planned out the costs of staffing the programmers, artists and testers necessary to complete online multiplayer feature and arrived at this amount."

Sam and Max may have gone beyond the boundaries of time and space in their latest series of episodic adventures, but does that mean they must also travel beyond the boundaries of your budget?

Nay, says Telltale Games, and to prove it the developer has made the first episode of Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space on iOS totes free, and discounted the other four episodes to $2.99 a piece. These aren't permanent pricing changes, of course, so anyone looking to get their adventuring feet wet with something a little more family friendly than the alternative should take note.

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If you've noticed a lot of a hockey-themed subjects cropping up during your Draw Something playtime lately, it's not just because its hockey season and Zynga is trying to stay topical. Rather, it's all part of Draw Something's new advertising initiative, which allows sponsors to insert their brand/product/whatever into the game's list of drawable somethings.

The NHL is the first major sponsor to hop onboard, posting hockey-related doodles to an official Pinterest board. The concept was tested using recognizable brand names like KFC, Doritos and Nike, with the response being positive enough to implement the system for real. Whether this type of integrated, subtle advertising experience is preferable to banner ads remains a matter of personal preference, but we do love the idea of drawing a box of Toaster Scrambles®.

This post fictionally brought to you by Pillsbury® Toaster Scrambles®. "They're practically food!"

Ambitious stealth game République has a long way to go before meeting its Kickstarter goal of $500,000 in its last eight days, but it hasn't stopped the folks at Camouflaj from adding some big names to the game's cast. Today's update reveals both David Hayter and Jennifer Hale will contribute their vocal talents.

"Hayter will play the role of the head revolutionary in the world of République, and Hale will voice the role of 'The Mentor' – a complex character who knows Hope better than anyone," the Kickstarter page reveals. Hayter is probably best known for voicing Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid games, while Jennifer Hale was the voice behind the female Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect series and every other speaking female in video games ever.

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Just in time for Hogwarts summer break, Warner Bros. has released Lego Harry Potter: Years 5-7 on the iTunes App store. The new universal app for iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch will set eager Expelliarmus users back $4.99.

In addition to the base game, the iOS port features a Dueling Club expansion where players can take on famous Harry Potter characters like Professor Snape, Lord Voldemort and more.

Electronic Arts has informed Joystiq that Rock Band for iOS will remain active for mobile rock stars. There was a panic at the disco yesterday after users of the app received a prompt telling them it would "no longer be playable" after May 31.

"Rock Band for iOS will remain live – the in-app message users received yesterday was sent in error," a representative for EA told us. "We apologize for the confusion this caused. We're working to clarify the issue that caused the error and will share additional information as soon as possible."

And the band played on.

Electronic Arts' Rock Band for iOS "will no longer be playable" after May 31. RockBandAide took note of a prompt in the app, which informs owners that the band is breaking up at the end of the month. At this time, there is no indication that a similar fate is in store for the more recent Rock Band Reloaded app.

Harmonix communications guru John Drake tweeted out that the developer was not the publisher of the title and is "working to better understand what's up ASAP."

Electronic Arts has yet to comment on the situation.

Draw Something users may be finding a new distraction, according to conclusions drawn by a new report from WebMediaBrands. As reported by the BBC, WebMediaBrands tracks Facebook usage as it relates to mobile applications. According to the data, the number of daily users that log in to Draw Something via Facebook dropped from 14.3 million 10.4 million from April 2 to May 2, suggesting that the game may be losing its death-like grip on the masses.

Zynga acquired Draw Something developer OMGPOP in March for a cool $200 million. It's important to note that the report doesn't include all Draw Something users, as it's also possible to connect with just an email address. Still, assuming the report is accurate, a decline of nearly 4 million daily users probably isn't the best news for the company after making such a large investment.

In 1993, we were too busy getting our chat room trolling on to play classic adventure games like The 7th Guest. Thankfully for us, modern technology lets us revisit older works via new platforms. The 7th Guest, for instance, has been available for quite some time on iOS and OS X.

But hey, maybe you – like us – have yet to purchase Trilobyte's seminal work? You'll be glad to hear, then, that the OS X and iOS versions of The 7th Guest are totally free today in celebration of May Day. We're not second-guessing it either! Free game!