Video games, all Sega plans with Rovio

18 April 20231 year ago babelfish

Rovio accepted Sega's offer. Last month he had discussions with the Israeli Playtika Holding, but the talks ended without an agreement

Those who are at least thirty today will remember that there was a time, well before the advent of Sony and Microsoft, that the market for living room consoles was evenly split between Nintendo and Sega. Several unfortunate choices on the part of the latter forced it to retire from the world of hardware manufacturers, but it still survived as a developer and producer. Now, the label best known for the hedgehog Sonic seems to want to sink its teeth into the mobile gaming industry.

The strategy of the Japanese Sega passes from Europe, precisely from the 776 million dollars (706 million euros) put on the plate to acquire Rovio, a former Finnish startup that has become famous all over the world thanks to its most famous IP, Angry Birds. As stated on CNBC , the acquisition would be total with a valuation of 9.25 euros per share (+19% compared to the last closing price). This hypothesis had already been written about: the Wall Street Journal had spoken of 1 billion dollars as the probable amount to reach an agreement. Rovio had previously held talks with Israel's Playtika Holding about a potential buyout of shares in the company for €8.50, but talks ended last month without a deal.

Rovio's video games have been downloaded over 5 billion times. The most curious aspect of the story is that the Finnish startup, like the Japanese software house, has been on the verge of bankruptcy several times. Before the brilliant intuition of Angry Birds released in December 2009, the small startup founded by three students of the Helsinki Polytechnic (Niklas Hed, Jarno Väkeväinen and Kim Dikert) was in its 52nd experiment and had now run out of funds.

With this move, Sega aims to exploit Rovio's talent, demonstrated with Angry Birds, to attack the gaming market which by 2026 should be worth over 263 billion dollars. "Among the rapidly growing video game markets, mobile titles have particularly high potential and Sega's long-term goal is to accelerate its expansion in this field," said Haruki Satomi, CEO.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia-on-demand/videogiochi-tutti-i-piani-di-sega-con-rovio/ on Tue, 18 Apr 2023 14:17:29 +0000.