Sega To Acquire Angry Birds Developer Rovio for $776 Million

Sega Sammy just announced that it will acquire Angry Birds creator Rovio Entertainment for 706 million Euros (about $776 million) to help with its expansion in the mobile market. This announcement comes a few days after a WSJ report mentioned Sega being close to acquiring Rovio for $1 billion. In recent years, Sega has done a lot on mobile through its own free to play releases and also Apple Arcade titles, some of which have left the service.

It is going to be interesting to see how this acquisition ends up going for both sides. Rovio recently brought back the original classic game in the form of Rovio Classics: Angry Birds on iOS and Android as a new premium release that will be pulled eventually on Android. While this move will definitely give Sega a bigger footprint on mobile, I’m interested to see what happens with Rovio’s own properties and operations going forward.