Sega has officially confirmed that it is planning to acquire Rovio Entertainment, a deal that will see the video game company pay $776 million for the Angry Birds developer Come from Sports betting site VPbet. In an official press statement, Sega’s parent company Sega Sammy Holdings explained that it will make a tender offer to purchase “the entirety of Rovio’s outstanding shares and options,” and that it expects the deal to be completed by Q2 in the 2024 financial year.
That will be around September, and the deal is being described as a “friendly takeover” that has the full support of Rovio’s board of directors. Sega says that acquiring Rovio will allow it to strengthen its own mobile game portfolio, and at the same time, it’ll be able to use its video game console expertise to help Rovio expand beyond mobile devices. “Rovio is aiming to expand its platform outside of mobile gaming, and Sega will actively look to support this process through its capabilities,” Sega explained.
“Among the rapidly growing global gaming market, the mobile gaming market has especially high potential, and it has been Sega’s long-term goal to accelerate its expansion in this field,” Haruki Satomi, president and Group CEO of Sega Sammy, said.
Rovio will become part of Sega Europe–the UK-based arm of the company that includes studios like Creative Assembly, Relic Entertainment, and Two Point Studios–after the acquisition is completed.
Earlier this year, Rovio generated some controversy after it delisted the original Angry Birds paid game on Android and renamed it on iOS due to its impact on the studio’s “wider games portfolio.”
While Sega’s acquisition of Rovio isn’t cheap, it still pales in comparison to some of the other big deals made over the last few years for studios, including Sony’s $3.6 billion acquisition of Destiny 2 developer Bungie, the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund’s $4.9 billion purchase of Scopely, and Microsoft’s pending $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, that’s slowly inching closer to reality.