Japanese gaming giant Sega has announced that it will buy Finnish gaming company Rovio Entertainment, the developer of the famous game Angry Birds, for €706 million (currently about RMB 5.344 billion). The deal is considered a “friendly acquisition” as Rovio’s board has agreed to and supported Sega’s offer. Sega expects the deal to be completed by September 2023.
It’s worth noting that the €706 million ($776 million) purchase price is significantly lower than the $1 billion purchase price reported by the Wall Street Journal over the weekend.
Sega said that the acquisition of Rovio is intended to strengthen its own mobile gaming business, leveraging Rovio’s unique expertise in mobile game operations to bring Sega’s existing and newly developed games to the global mobile gaming market, a market with tremendous potential. Sega also said that Rovio wants to go beyond the mobile gaming space and that Sega will actively support Rovio in achieving this goal.
Haruki Satomi, President and Group CEO of Sega Sammy Holdings said, “The mobile gaming market in particular has high potential in the fast-growing global gaming market, and it has been a long-term goal of Sega to accelerate its expansion in this area. I feel very fortunate to have entered into such a deal with Rovio, which has the globally beloved Angry Birds brand and many talented employees who support the company’s industry-leading mobile game development and operations capabilities. Historically, Sega has released numerous classic games, such as the Sonic the Hedgehog series. I believe there will be significant synergies in the future by integrating the brands, characters, fan bases, and corporate cultures and functions of both companies.”
Rovio Entertainment has a number of self-published games, including Angry Birds and Little Thief, of which Angry Birds is the company’s most successful game title. Angry Birds is also the first Guinness Record-certified handheld game with 1 billion downloads, and as of last year, the total number of downloads of Rovio’s games exceeded 5 billion.
