Sega Sammy Holdings, the parent company of game developer and publisher Sega, has announced its intention to acquire Rovio, the Finnish studio behind the Angry Birds franchise, for $776 million.
This acquisition was spearheaded by the Sega Europe branch of the company, which has also acquired game developers like Creative Assembly and Amplitude Studios. This seemed like a surprising acquisition when the reports about it first emerged, but Sega confirmed the deal and revealed its reasoning for it in a press release. Namely, it says that this deal will allow Sega “to further strengthen its position in this fast-growing mobile and global gaming market.”
Sega loves the extremely strong foothold Rovio has in the live service mobile game space thanks to Angry Birds and its game operation platform Beacon. Because of this, Sega can bring many of its series to mobile with the help of Rovio, while Rovio can “expand its platform outside of mobile gaming” with the help of Sega. The press release also makes it clear that Sega and Rovio will continue pushing the presence of Sonic the Hedgehog and Angry Birds, respectively, outside of gaming and can exchange notes and work together as part of that process.
Expect Sega franchises on mobile and Angry Birds back on console eventually, with many more multimedia projects for both happening along the way. Now, the $776 million acquisition needs to be approved by regulators worldwide, which Sega and Rovio expect to be done sometime between July and September of this year. It remains to be seen if it runs into the same kind of scrutiny as Microsoft’s attempted acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
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