Sometime after discontinuing updates and support of the six Angry Birds games (seven if you count Bad Piggies) that were released for the PC, Rovio made them completely free. How? Well, the games have always been free to download (until Rovio took them off their website). Any copy bought, whether physical or digital came with a key, which, when passed through the in-game online activation prompt, would unlock the full game. After some boilerplate connection establishment (DNS, TLS), the activation process itself amounted to just a single HTTP GET request and a response.
What Rovio did (although I cannot say exactly when) is rigged its activation servers to always reply “OK” (thus activating the game), regardless of the data in the request. As of 2023, any demo version of any Angry Birds game can be thus activated to unlock the complete level sets.
In case that the activation servers go offline at some future point, I captured here the details of the requests sent by each game, and the responses currently echoed by the servers. Theoretically, it could allow reproducing the activation with some local running server and a bogus DNS. The activation is a one-time process, after which the games can be played indefinitely, without any online connection.
| Game | Ver | Server URL | HTTP GET Path | Request Parameters | Response Parameters |
| Classic | 4.0.0 | proxy.rovio.com | /consumeKey/ | ?key=K&udid=U&types=SABC2011FL | ?status=1&type=SABC2011FL |
| Seasons | 4.1.0 | proxy.rovio.com | /consumeKey/ | ?key=K&udid=U&types=SABS2011FL | ?status=1&type=SABS2011FL |
| Rio | 2.2.0 | proxy.rovio.com | /consumeKey/ | ?key=K&udid=U&types=SABR2011FL | ?status=1&type=SABR2011FL |
| Space | 2.0.0 | cloud.rovio.com | /drm/consumeKey/ | ?key=K&udid=U&types=SPC12FL | ?status=1&type=SPC12FL |
| Star Wars | 1.5.0 | cloud.rovio.com | /drm/consumeKey/ | ?key=K&udid=U&types=ABSW12FL | ?status=1&type=ABSW12FL |
| Star Wars II | 1.5.1 | cloud.rovio.com | /drm/consumeKey/ | ?key=K&udid=U&types=ABSW22013FL | ?status=1&type=ABSW22013FL |
| Bad Piggies | 1.5.1 | cloud.rovio.com | /drm/consumeKey/ | ?key=K&udid=U&types=BDPGS12FL | ?status=1&type=BDPGS12FL |
Notes
- K is the key you entered in the game. U is an installation ID auto-generated by the game installer.
- The types= argument in the request (and type= in the response) is used to identify the game.
- Currently, the server checks neither the key nor the udid. It simply replies with status=1 and echoes back the type (which can be any string). The games interpret such a response as a successful registration.
- Angry Birds Seasons is the only game that requires the key to be in a valid format with four groups of four characters, separated by dashes (XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX). The server will accept any key (even a blank one), but the game will not send the request if the key is not in the format above.
Cloaked Thargoid 