This past weekend, rumors and speculation about Angry Birds developer Rovio being acquired by Sega ran rampant across the internet. Both sides had been quite about the entire situation, until now. Rovio themselves have announced that they are indeed talking to Sega Sammy, the parent company of Sega, with the possibility that the video game giant will outright buy them and bring them into their video game umbrella. The amount for the potential purchase was not disclosed, but among the initial rumor was also the asking price, whopping $1 billion. At the time of this writing, Rovio has not given an update on this, but should it come to fruition, that would make this one of the most expensive purchases for a single mobile-video game company next to Take-Two’s mammoth acquisition of Zynga last year.
The initial report came from The Wall Street Journal, who reported that Sega and Rovio were “nearing deal” to have the former acquire the latter for the aforementioned price of $1 billion. The real interest here is what Sega, or specifically Sega Sammy, would do with Rovio and their IPs, and why they would potentially pay such a high price for a franchise that has seen a decline in popularity. This is especially intriguing due to the recent removal of Angry Birds from the Google Play Store, one of the most active digital retailers in the mobile game market. In addition, they changed the name of the iOS version to Red’s First Flight, further moving away from the brand in general.
As we already mentioned, Rovio is far removed from being one of the world’s leading developers in the mobile gaming market. Their star franchise and original IP Angry Birds was recorded by the Guinness World Records as the very first mobile title to reach one billion downloads. In recent years, the title’s reign as mobile gaming king has been overtaken by a slew of new mobile game entries, such as PUBG Mobile, Candy Crush Saga, Pokemon GO, and Clash of Clans. It’ll be interesting to see what Sega does with the developer and their IPs, and if the original post is accurate, then that deal should be officially announced in the coming days.