Toni Hobrecht
Sega Corporation has announced plans to acquire Rovio Entertainment Oyj for €706 million ($775 million). Rovio Entertainment Oyj is the company behind one of the most popular mobile games of all time – Angry Birds. The deal should take place in September 2023.
The deal sees Sega take over Rovio’s mobile game development and leverage the Finnish company’s mobile gaming expertise to develop multi-platform titles across Sega’s IP portfolio. In concrete terms: by buying Rovio, Sega wants to learn how to code mobile games properly and successfully port existing games to mobile phones.
“Among the rapidly growing global gaming market, the mobile gaming market has especially high potential, and it has been Sega’s long-term goal to accelerate its expansion in this field. I feel blessed to be able to announce such a transaction with Rovio, a company that owns “Angry Birds”.”
Haruki Satomi, President and CEO of Sega Sammy Holdings
The press release also mentions Sega’s plans to expand Rovio’s platform “outside of mobile gaming”. So the strategy works the other way too – Sega could launch new Angry Birds titles for consoles, as well as new feature films and TV series with Rovio content. Rovio mobile games have been downloaded over 5 billion times to date. The underlying Beacon platform for game development is another important part of the Sega acquisition.
