The Wall Street Journal reports that Sega is close to buying Rovio Entertainment, which owns the Angry Birds mobile game business, for $1 billion. WSJ sources said Sega might seal the transaction early next week.
Given the collapse of the Angry Birds games, Sega, especially its parent company Sega Sammy Holdings, spending so much on Rovio is shocking. Since 2014, when Rovio disclosed dwindling profitability and layoffs, the franchise has seemed to decline.
Despite poor reviews, the Angry Birds Movie, Rovio’s 2016 film adaptation, is the fifth highest-grossing video game film. The Angry Birds Movie 2 was less successful. Rovio witnessed Angry Birds lose popularity to Candy Crush.
Rovio’s original Angry Birds game was deleted from the Google Play Store and renamed Red’s First Flight for iOS. Unfortunately, the move appeared to divert gamers to its profitable freemium successors and hide the purchase once, playing the original game’s business model forever.
In March, Rovio ended plans to acquire Israeli developer Playtika for $800 million. Instead, Sega may acquire Angry Birds, a Finnish firm.
The original Angry Birds game was the first mobile game to exceed 1 billion downloads (a Guinness World Records record). Rovio claimed its entire library of titles had reached 5 billion downloads last year. The corporation may be worth a fifth of a dollar for each download. Remember when Take-Two purchased Zynga for $12.7 billion?
Sega may have fresh heroes like Sonic and buddies ready for an epic mobile gaming series.