Sega is reportedly close to buying Rovio Entertainment, the company that owns the Angry Birds mobile game franchise – for a whopping $1 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. Sega could close the big deal early next week, according to people who spoke to it WSJ.
It’s surprising to think that Sega – particularly its parent company Sega Sammy Holdings – would want to spend that much on Rovio given the dwindling popularity of the Angry Birds games. The original game was a huge success in 2009, but the franchise seems to have regressed since its peak in 2014, when Rovio reported falling profits and fired.
In 2016, Rovio attempted a film adaptation, The Angry Birds Movie, that was a box office success and is still the seventh highest-grossing video game film – even if reviews weren’t kind. The 2019 sequel, The Angry Birds Movie 2, did not achieve the same success. Rovio watched how competitors liked it Candy Crush grew more and more and ate away the interest in it Angry Birds.
Perhaps Sega dreams of launching Angry Birds into the Nights
Recently, Rovio removed the original Angry Birds game from the Google Play Store and renamed the iOS version to Red’s first flight. The move was ostensibly made to transfer players to the lucrative freemium sequels and obscure the original game’s buy-once-play-forever business model.
Rovio previously came close to an $800 million deal to acquire Israeli developer Playtika, but those talks were officially cut off in March. Now Sega could soon own the Finland-based Angry Birds company instead.
Perhaps Sega has a new roster of heroes aligned with Sonic and friends, waiting for an epic mobile game franchise to propel them forward.
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