SEGA acquires Angry Birds developer for a lot less than $1 billion

Rovio’s story is one of struggle, as the company known for the iconic Angry Birds franchise barely made any money after 2013. The Finnish company that celebrated Angry Birds’ two billionth download at the beginning of 2014, only made a €10 million profit at the end of the same year.

After numerous layoffs due to the poor sales of the licensed Angry Birds merchandise and the by-products of Angry Birds, Rovio started to make a lot of changes at the head of the management.

Unfortunately, that didn’t help much, and the Finnish company was forced to close many of its studios and continue to fire many of its developers due to low profits. Although Rovio briefly returned to profitability with the success of the Angry Birds Movie released in March 2017, but that didn’t help either.

Rovio became a publicly traded company in October 2017 and the company was valued at around $1 billion. After acquiring two more studios, PlayRaven and Darkfire Games, in 2018 and 2020 respectively, Rovio received acquisition bids from multiple companies.

The first one that we know of came from Israeli mobile company Playtika, which offered to acquire Rovio for $800 million. SEGA also offered to buy Rovio for around $1 billion and a bid was made back in April.

However, it looks like the sum was much lower than $1 billion, as SEGA announced this week that it closed the Rovio acquisition deal for “just” €706 million ($776 million).

Now that Rovio is part of SEGA, it will be interesting to see if the Japanese publisher/developer will allow the studio to continue to make Angry Birds games or they will be helping build SEGA’s franchises.

New IPs would be great to see too, but the mobile gaming market is very tough right now, so it will need to be a very good new IP to succeed, and Rovio has been trying that for many years to no success.