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.

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Rovio Entertainment has a number of self-developed games under its belt, including Angry Birds and Little Thief, of which Angry Birds is the company’s most successful title, according to the news. Angry Birds is also the first handheld game to be certified by the Guinness Book of Records as having been downloaded 1 billion times, and as of last year, Rovio’s games had been downloaded more than 5 billion times in total.

However, the original Angry Birds was taken down from the app store as early as 2019, with the claim at the time being device compatibility issues. In 2022, however, Rovio released a remake of Angry Birds, the version that can now be downloaded from the store, remade using the Unity engine and still without in-app purchases and ads.

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In response, Rovio’s head of strategy Ben Mattes responded to the foreign media Axios, saying that the move was misunderstood by netizens and that it was not the first generation that was shelved in order to let everyone play the new one.

Ben Mattes said that because the first generation of Angry Birds was so popular (priced at $0.99 with no insider purchases), it was at the top of searches and the first thing players saw when they searched for the game was the $0.99 paid version, causing players to neither want to buy it nor download other free versions.

The first thing you see when you search for the game is the $0.99 paid version.

Rovio has been trying to solve this problem for almost a year, so it had to make a radical decision to rename the first generation of Angry Birds to Red’s First Flight and remove the word “Angry Birds” from the game’s metadata to see if it would lower its search ranking. Let’s see if that lowers search rankings.

Ben Mattes said that if the iOS version of the renaming test is successful, the game could be relaunched on the Google Play Store as Red’s First Flight.

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