‘Angry Birds’ company to be sold to Sega for $1 billion
In a report by The Wall Street Journal, Sega may be in a position to buy Rovio Entertainment, the company behind the Angry Birds mobile game franchise, for a whopping $1 billion, sources tell WSJ. Sega may finalize the deal early next week.
Due to the decline in popularity of Angry Birds games, Sega Sammy Holdings — whose parent company Sega is — would want to spend so much on Rovio. In 2009, the original game was a smash hit, but the franchise has fallen off since its 2014 peak when Rovio reported falling profits and layoffs.
While reviews weren’t kind, Rovio’s 2016 film adaptation of Angry Birds was a box office success and remains the seventh highest-grossing video game movie.
Angry Birds’ sequel, The Angry Birds Movie 2, failed to achieve the same success as the first. Rovio watched as Candy Crush gained popularity, eating away at the interest from Angry Birds.
The iOS version of Angry Birds has been renamed Red’s First Flight after Rovio removed the original game from the Google Play Store. According to reports, the move was made to divert players to its lucrative freemium sequels and obscure the original’s buy once, play forever business model.
The Finnish video game company previously approached Israeli developer Playtika about taking over the Angry Birds franchise, but the talks dwindled in March. Now, Sega might soon own the company.
As of last year, Rovio claimed its combined library of games had reached 5 billion downloads, including the original game which was the first mobile game to reach 1 billion downloads, a record certified by Guinness World Records.
Taking that into account, maybe there’s a case for valuing the company at a fifth of a dollar per download. Remember when Take-Two bought Zynga for $12.7 billion? Maybe Sega has a new set of heroes on par with Sonic and friends waiting for a mobile games franchise to propel them forward.
