Sega buys Angry Birds developer Rovio for $775 million
Sega has announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire in whole Angry Birds developer Rovio for €706 million, or about $705 million USD. Sega announced the acquisition on its corporate website, and in its notice of acquisition said that it was a “friendly takeover,” meaning Rovio’s board of directors agreed to the sale.
Sega’s European subsidiary, aptly named Sega Europe, will be the new owner of the Angry Birds developer, which is headquartered in Finland. Sega says that the primary purpose of the acquisition is to enhance its mobile gaming capabilities, which it has been slowly building up in recent years.
According to the notice of acquisition, Rovio’s experience and success in live service mobile games will be put to good use under the Sega banner, and the company says that Rovio will bring “Sega’s current and new titles to the global gaming market.”
The notice also posits that both Rovio and Sega have been successful in bringing their video game IPs to other mediums, such as film, TV, and merchandising. While it is technically true that there are Angry Birds movies, whether or not they were successful is somewhat debatable. There are also far too many Angry Birds TV shows to list here, but they were all products that existed.
There have been some signs that Rovio might be in a little bit of trouble lately, though. The company pulled its Rovio Classics version of the original Angry Birds game from the Google Play Store last month, and renamed the Apple iOS version to “Red’s First Flight.”
At the time, the company’s community manager Shawn Buckelew said that Rovio Classics: Angry Bird was cannibalizing its live service games, as it was a one-time purchase with no ongoing microtransactions. Buckelew said that if the company’s live service games don’t improve and grow, the outlook of the entire company could change, and it looks like exactly that has happened.
Regulatory hurdles aside, Sega expects the acquisition to close in the second quarter of its 2023/2024 financial year, which puts it at sometime in the next eight months or so. Given the relatively small size of the acquisition, it’s not expected to face significant regulatory scrutiny.
Sega, of course, is not the only company making acquisitions, or at least trying to. Microsoft has spent the last year attempting to acquire major publisher Activision Blizzard. The deal has faced heavy opposition from Sony, but looks to be almost to the finish line, after the UK’s CMA agreed the deal wouldn’t affect console competition.
