Sega Is Buying ‘Angry Birds’ Developer Rovio For $776 Million

The rumblings turned out to be true. Sega, of Sonic the Hedgehog fame, is buying Angry Birds mobile developer Rovio for $776 million, less than the $1 billion price that was previously being rumored.

It is yet another example of a large-scale mobile developer being scooped up by a bigger, traditional brand, albeit with a much lower price tag than other deals. Take-Two previously purchased Farmville’s Zynga for $12.7 billion. A huge chunk of Microsoft’s Activision-Blizzard $69 deal is Candy Crush’s King, which boasts more Daily Active Users than Activision or Blizzard combined. By comparison, $776 million for Rovio might look like a steal.

Is it? That’s hard to say. Angry Birds is far from the peak of its popularity when it burst onto the mobile scene in 2009. Since then, it’s ballooned into multiple games and elaborate licensing deals from toys to TV shows, not dissimilar to Sega’s own Sonic the Hedgehog, who lately, has had more good movies than games.

My first thought when I heard this was “does Sega even have a billion dollars?” but it’s a far different brand than it used to be after mergers and sales of its various components. It definitely has not gone full Atari, as it still makes video games like Streets of Rage and Bayonetta, but it’s miles away from the Sega you likely grew up with. And now a significant portion of it is tied up in this Rovio deal. The $776 million purchase is out of a $4.85 billion market cap. A significant sum for the brand.

As for Rovio, they are…still making loads of mostly Angry Birds-based video games. Since Angry Birds’ release in 2009, there have been 23 different versions of Angry Birds including two Star Wars crossover, a Transformer tie-in and a VR/AR project called Isle of Pigs. In 2022 they released Angry Birds Journey and Rovio Classics: Angry Birds. There have also been two Angry Birds movies and, I’m having trouble believing this, 11 different Angry Birds TV series since 2013. Stick with what works, I guess.

Relying solely on Angry Birds instead of finding success with multiple franchises may be why Rovio is going for so much cheaper than other devs. We’ll see if Sega has any big plans for them, or if this is going to be like, Angry Birds: Green Hill Zone, as the next project.

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