Sonic birds
Japanese gaming company Sega is set to acquire Rovio — the developer behind the wildly successful Angry Birds series of mobile games — for €706m ($776m). The deal, which was first reported to be close to completion on Friday, is the latest in a flurry of dealmaking in the gaming industry in recent years, and will bring Rovio's mobile-first expertise to the list of storied franchises at Sega, which includes Sonic the Hedgehog and numerous arcade games.
Slingshot to the top
Rovio was one of the first developers to slingshot its way to the top of the nascent app stores with the original Angry Birds, a game in which players throw (ironically wingless) birds at structures in a bid to try and remove all of the pigs from the screen. That simple mechanic turned out to be highly addictive and it spawned a wave of free physics-based games on mobile… transforming the Finland-based Rovio from indie studio to mobile game maestro in just a few months.
The company, which now has ~550 employees, claims that Angry Birds was the first mobile game to be downloaded more than a billion times. However, Rovio has never really been able to reproduce the breakout success of Angry Birds, instead relying on releasing new versions and spin-offs of the same game. In fact, Rovio has since released dozens of games under the Angry Birds name — including collaborations with Star Wars and Transformers — and the franchise still accounts for more than 80% of the company’s games revenue, more than 13 years since its initial release.
Rovio's share price is up ~18%on the news of the acquisition, but it remains below its 2017 IPO price.
