Sega is, without a doubt, an essential company in the history of videogames, but the truth is that Rovio also deserves a similar consideration, since it was responsible for one of the first great successes of games aimed at the then incipient market for smart mobile phones. Angry Birds, along with other great classics like Plants vs. Zombies, showed many of us that the potential of smartphone games was much higher than we had thought until then.
Long gone are the times when Sega beat the copper with Nintendo in the video console market, while its most recent creations dominated the best arcades in the world (although finally it still maintains its own in Akihabara, Tokyo, which did not close even though they were close to doing so). Nevertheless, continues to be highly relevant in the gaming industry today.
For its part, we could say something very similar about Rovio. The release of Angry Birds in 2009 turned the then-small independent studio into one of the biggest stars of the moment. Soon new titles like Angry Birds: Space, Angry Birds: Star Wars and more began to arrive, as well as all kinds of productions around these angry birds that stole so many hours from us, with our full consent and to our total satisfaction. 14 years later, the study has not been able to repeat the success of its early days.
Thus, both companies have known better times and, although they are not yet comparable to Norma Desmond, the truth is that they need to carry out actions that improve their position in a market as competitive and complex as that of video games. In this regard, they say that there is strength in unity, and that is what they must have thought of the Japanese veteran since, according to what we can read in The Wall Street Journal, Sega is finalizing the purchase of Rovio for 1,000 million dollars.
You read correctly, yes, finalizing, and it seems that both companies have carried out practically all the previous steps of this process with great discretion, to the point that according to said article the purchase could be completed as early as next week. This will allow Sega to enter the smartphone games market, and will give Rovio the financial and business support that the company has needed for some years now.
Although when talking about the still inconclusive purchase of Activision-Blizzard King by Microsoft, the focus is generally on titles for PC and console, and especially Call of Duty, we must remember that this operation is important for Redmond for various reasons, and one of them is precisely King, which would also be an important boost for Microsoft in terms of the smartphone games market. Now, with this clever operation, Sega could have gotten ahead of Microsoft in this regard.
