Sega to purchase Rovio for £625 million
In a surprise development, former hardware developers Sega have announced that it will be purchasing the studio behind Angry Birds for £625 million. While this figure is certainly not small, it does seem a lot lower key when compared to the likes of bigger gaming acquisitions in recent years. For example, Sony's purchase of the relatively small studio Bungie' set them back £2.9 billion and the Activision Blizzard buyout at the hands of Microsoft is set to be the largest ever at around £55 billion. Compared to these, Sega's Rovio purchase seems to be far less noteworthy.
However, the price point of this deal shouldn't detract from its likely impact on the gaming industry in the coming years. Its important to realize jut how influential and profitable mobile gaming has become. Although not appealing to core gamers, mobile games tap into the nearly endless resource of causal players. While it may have only just now been easy to purchase a PlayStation 5, nearly everybody in the world has a mobile phone from which they can play a vast number of titles. Rovio was one of the first companies to see the potential of this with the release of Angry Birds on the app store for £0.99 in 2009. Needless to say, the bizarre game about slingshotting birds into pigs to get their eggs back was a roaring success.
Of course, now the mobile gaming space has evolved (and Rovio with it) to focusing on microtransactions and loot box based transactions to keep the money flowing in. Due to how big the Angry Birds IP has gotten over the last decade, its spawned an incredible amount of spinoffs which provide an impressive amount of revenue for the company. That's where Sega comes in. The company has never been one to shy away from mobile gaming porting over many classic titles to the small screen and even bringing out more modern games like Sonic the Hedgehog 4 to the platform in line with the console releases. It makes sense, then, why they would want to be at the helm of arguably the biggest mobile-centric gaming company in the world.
In a press release, Sega stated the following
"We wish to use Rovio's distinctive know-how in live service mobile game operation, to bring Sega's current and new titles to the global mobile gaming market... help Rovio expand its platform outside of mobile gaming"
From this, we can see that Sega wants a larger slice in the mobile gaming pie while also giving Rovio and the Angry Birds IP an opportunity to have more of a presence on traditional gaming hardware. Although this was less than successful with the Angry Birds trilogy releasing on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 back in 2012, with a greater budget and backing from Sega, its possible that more impressive projects could be in the works for more modern consoles. Regardless, expect to see a bigger presence of Sega on mobile in the next few years as a result of this acquisition.
