Sega is buying Angry Birds creator Company Rovio for $776 million
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| image credits- engadget.com |
Sega is buying Rovio, the Finnish video-game company best known for creating Angry Birds, in a €706 million (~$776 million) deal. Though a slew of existing Sega games are available on iOS and Android, like Sonic the Hedgehog, the company is looking to "accelerate its expansion" into mobile gaming.
Buying Rovio will give Sega access to Beacon, its "high-level experience" platform designed to improve and simplify game design, monetization and maintenance. Basically, its the accelerator Sega is looking for to bring it's current and future titles into the big leagues of mobile gaming. "I feel blessed to be able to announce such a transaction with Rovio, a company that owns Angry Birds, which is loved across the world, and home to many skilled employees that support the company’s industry leading mobile game development and operating capabilities," Haruki Satomi, President and CEO of Sega Sammy, said in a statement.
Angry Birds is truly the definition of "event". If you asked anyone in the early 2010s if they had played Angry Birds, almost everyone would say yes. By early 2014, Rovio claimed that the Angry Birds series had surpassed two billion downloads and 200 million games were played per month.
Since then, its popularity has definitely declined, but Angry Birds hasn't faded from the world's consciousness (with more than 5 billion downloads on Rovio). According to Box Office Mojo, movies inspired by the games grossed nearly $347 million worldwide in 2015, while Angry Birds 2 fell to $147.8 million in 2019. Just last year, Angry Birds returned to the App Store as Rovio Classics for Angry Birds. 99 cents.
Rovio has yet to produce anything close to the success of Angry Birds but, with the deal expected to close "during the third quarter of 2023," it'll be interesting to see what comes next.