Sega buys Rovio, the creators of Angry Birds for $775 million

Last week, Savvy Games Group bought Scopely for a few billion dollars. This time, SEGA is buying Rovio Entertainment. A lot of changes have been taking place in the video game industry for several months now, with deals regularly worth hundreds of millions at least. Let's take a look at the context and the implications of this acquisition of Rovio by SEGA.

A slightly smaller buyout than the last few deals

It must be said that the year 2022 has been marked by some very big studio buyout deals in the video game industry. First, Zynga was bought by Take-Two for $12.7 billion, Tencent got the majority of Supercell and Microsoft has been trying to buy Activision Blizzard-King for a year for a total of $68.7 billion. In this context, SEGA's purchase of Rovio for $775 million no longer seems so titanic.

In truth, this underwhelming buyout is not surprising. Angry Birds is an iconic mobile gaming license, so much so that Rovio wanted to make its red bird the mascot of phone gaming. However, apart from this initial success, the Finnish company has not managed to turn a second attempt. The studio exploited its Angry Birds franchise with a maximum of games, movies, cinematic content and derivative products. Since then, Rovio Entertainment has not managed to create a buzz around original creations and Angry Birds has lost momentum.

As a result, SEGA bought Rovio Entertainment based on this unique success and the expertise of the studio's developers. On the other hand, Zynga has had a string of successful releases with Farmville, Merge Dragons, Words with Friends and many other casual phone games. It's not surprising to see that Rovio is less valuable than some of its competitors that were acquired last year.

⭐ At the same time, Rovio Entertainment is trying to climb back from oblivion with the release of Angry Birds Kingdoms by testing out new RPG and tactical features for its flagship license. Find out how to play it right now!

The future of the Rovio buyout: SEGA games on mobile

The deal for SEGA's acquisition of Rovio Entertainment has not yet been signed at the time of writing. The final announcement is expected early next week. Rovio has officially confirmed that it is in acquisition talks with Japanese publisher SEGA with an amount of 775 million dollars on the table or even 1 billion. Moreover, these negotiations come after the refusal of Rovio's buyout offer from Playtika, which amounted to 750 million dollars.

For SEGA, buying Rovio Entertainment, the creators of Angry Birds, is obviously an opportunity to make mobile ports with a level of expertise inherited from all those years of presence on phones since the release of Angry Birds in 2009. This is not SEGA's first attempt at mobile or cross-platform. Indeed, the Japanese group launched its Sonic Speed Simulator on Roblox last year and collaborated with Feral Interactive for the porting of Company of Heroes mobile, for example. So we can expect future mobile games based on SEGA licenses.