One of the privileges of being a journalist is that you get to indulge your nosiness. So after wondering how things have been going at Rovio since the Finnish Angry Birds firm was bought by Sega in 2023 for a cool $776 million, we decided to pick up the phone and ask them (or rather schedule a video call, as is the done thing these days).
Amplitude Studios head Romain de Waubert de Genlis told GamesIndustry.biz last year that Sega switched strategies a while back to focus more on their core IPs, consoles, and mobile – hence why the PC-focused studios Amplitude and Relic Entertainment were spun off in 2024. But Sega has relatively little history in the mobile development space when compared with its long history on consoles, and earlier this year the company attributed a $200 million impairment to Rovio’s performance, with Sega CEO Haruki Satomi saying that Rovio’s Q3 results “fell significantly short of the initial forecast due to rapid changes in the market environment and other factors.”
So what’s been going on over there since we last caught up? How has Rovio settled in under the Sega umbrella? And what does the future hold?
Ben Mattes, creative officer for the Angry Birds IP, says Sega’s buyout of Rovio in 2023 didn’t come as a complete surprise. “[I] had some sort of sense that that’s the direction that the wind was blowing,” he says. “We knew that Rovio was being considered.”
“There were a few different people who were in the running, some more appealing as owners than others, I think it’s fair and safe to say. And my personal recollection, both as a leader on the brand, but also as just a player, was when I heard Sega, I was like, ‘Yeah, damn straight’. That’s heads and shoulders better than some of the other suitors who were being considered from a sort of brand fit point of view.”
Fitting in
But how good a fit is Rovio for Sega? Partnerships between Western studios and Japanese owners haven’t always gone smoothly. Square Enix, for example, offloaded several of its Western studios to Embracer back in 2022, with Eidos Montreal founder Stephane D’Astous saying that “Square Enix Japan was not as committed as we hoped initially.”
Mattes puts a different spin on it by pointing out that both Rovio and Sega are global companies: Rovio has several studios in North America and Europe, while Sega has offices worldwide. “Rovio works very closely with all of them,” he says, adding that Rovio teams often fly to Japan for meetings. He points out that Rovio has been collaborating with Sega’s Japanese studios on things like the just-released Angry Birds DLC for Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, which now features Red as a driver.
How does that kind of international collaboration work in practical terms? Mattes says it involves a lot of written communication – which can be more easily translated – and it often kicks off with a conference call. “We all get together, we hold hands and tell each other how much we love each other’s IP, and how much we’re looking forward to the collaboration, and how respectful we’re going to be of each other’s properties. And then we get to work and it’s, ‘Nope, the eyebrows are a little bit too thick,’ and ‘No, the head doesn’t look like that’.”
Aside from the language and cultural barriers, there’s the fact that whereas mobile is Rovio’s bread and butter, it only accounts for a relatively small portion of Sega’s portfolio. Titles like Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage! have been big hits for the company, but it’s largely a domestic business, with around 91% of Sega’s mobile earnings coming from Japan. Mattes says that mobile isn’t alien to Sega, but it does involve a different development mindset, which is all about testing and iterating games from very early on out in the open, rather than keeping games a secret until the go-to-market phase.
“So you’re taking your asset, like your Angry Birds IP, something that is extremely valuable and precious to you, and you’re putting it out there on a concept that is frankly very rough and has all sorts of work still to be done. And you’re looking for early signals to help give the team and the entire organization confidence that this is worth pursuing. And if you don’t get those signals, maybe you iterate on it once or twice, but ultimately if you’re not going in the right direction, you pull it down. And so you’re playing your hand, as it were, you’re showing your cards very early.”
“We’re not interested in making a game that does 10 million a year or something like that”
The majority of titles might not make it past those early stages. “Which means that the graveyard of killed mobile games, Angry Birds or otherwise, is huge, because we’re not interested in making a game that does 10 million a year or something like that. We want to make a hit.”
“I think any modern mobile free-to-play gaming company probably has a graveyard just as big as we do. It is an unfortunate reality of the way that these games are made that if you’re not getting the right signals, you’re going to pivot, you’re going to turn those energies, and you’re going to put it somewhere else, because unlike in a typical PC or console game, you’re not looking for, ‘Can this game be a hit when it launches?’ You’re looking for, ‘Does this game have the right signals to last for a decade or more?'”
More than mobile
What about that huge $200 million writedown on the Rovio purchase? Mattes says that since his role is all about the Angry Birds IP rather than the company’s finances, he’s not the right person to comment. “I have the luxury of not paying all that much attention to that sort of stuff in my current job.”
But he adds that Rovio’s worth to Sega goes beyond mobile games. “They know that we’re a transmedia company. They know that we’re a mobile-first company. They know that they’ve had successes with Sonic. They know that they want to grow their mobile expertise. So of course from day zero, the ambition has been to make Angry Birds every bit as big as Sonic is from a transmedia point of view, and grow not just the Rovio mobile free-to-play business, but all of Sega’s mobile and free-to-play expertise and live-ops expertise across its portfolio.”
The Angry Birds Movie 3, due out in December, is a key part of achieving that grand transmedia ambition. Mattes says Rovio is in constant touch with Sega’s “Sonic Pillar” office in Burbank, California, which controls everything to do with how the Sonic IP is used. A couple of years back, Justin Scarpone, Sega’s head of global transmedia, laid out the company’s aim to become a “great entertainment company” beyond video games in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz.
Mattes says it’s been “inspirational” to see the growth of Sonic as a transmedia franchise. “There’s been a lot of really interesting lessons there for us about like, ‘Oh, OK, we’ve got this movie coming out, what lessons can we learn from their success story that we didn’t necessarily do in movies one and two that we can do better this time’.”
“The ambition has been to make Angry Birds every bit as big as Sonic is from a transmedia point of view”
He adds that there’s a lot of crossover between Sonic and Angry Birds in terms of the theme of “aspirational heroism,” an aspect that he says “we find very appealing and are further reinforcing throughout our projects.”
Mattes partly attributes the longevity of the Angry Birds IP – which debuted in 2009 – to the brand’s efforts in the realm of transmedia. “I think that’s given us visibility that allows us to continue to make brand-renewing partnerships. But I also think it’s given us depth.” Adding storylines beyond the simple act of launching birds at naughty pigs has resulted in a “much bigger, richer IP,” he says.
Angry Birds all of the time
It also seems unlikely that Rovio will be exploring many titles that don’t feature its biggest IP. “I don’t think anyone is saying only do Angry Birds, but of course, if we allocate resources away from an Angry Birds game towards X – whatever X might be, whether that’s some new IP or some existing Sega IP that we think could do really well on mobile – we have to convince ourselves before we even put a dollar into it. We have to convince ourselves that all the pre-signal data is there to suggest that that thing is going to do better than if we put those resources into an Angry Birds product.”
That’s a high bar to pass, but Mattes says there have always been titles in development at Rovio that don’t feature Angry Birds. “Some came out and didn’t work, some came out and pivoted, some came out and shut,” he says. In addition, he says, “there’s always been two, three, four, sometimes five Angry Birds projects across multiple platforms in development at any given time.” Expect plenty of brand activity around the tent pole of the upcoming Angry Birds movie.
But one thing Mattes is adamant about is making sure each title is the right fit for the IP. “It’s very important to us that we don’t say, ‘Oh, we need to expand the brand, let’s make an Angry Birds first-person shooter.’ We believe very deeply in the zone of maximal brand acceptability – that if people expect [one thing], and you give them something way over here, it’s not going to attract the new players, because they’re looking at that and saying, ‘Yo, I’ve got Fortnite, man, I don’t need that,’ and the existing fans are going to say, ‘That’s not my Angry Birds’.”
We point out that Plants vs Zombies made a similar-sounding expansion into shooter territory with Garden Warfare in 2014. “And that was a huge leap. No judgement, right? Good for them. But that was a huge leap from what you were used to playing. They did a fantastic job of capturing the sort of essence of Plants vs Zombie-dom, but I think there’s probably some people who might say, ‘Yeah, that was too much for me. I was expecting this and you gave me that’.”
That said, Mattes would like to expand the pool of genres for Angry Birds games – although he wants to do it slowly and carefully, one step at a time, with things like the Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds collaboration and the appearance of Angry Birds in Two Point Museum. “And then down the line, OK, now it’s time for us to do this big new thing, because our community and our fans and our players have grown with us along this journey. We’re not just saying, ‘Yeah, we’re a shooter IP now’.”
“We’ve done a lot of different mobile games in the past, and some of those could spin and grow into much more rich, populated games and worlds and experiences on PC and mobile. But I also think when you look at the pillars of Angry Birds, you’ve got memorable birds with powers, you’ve got conflict, you’ve got spectacular consequences, you’ve got crafty antagonists, you’ve got protect and defend, you’ve got irreverent humour, topical themes. There’s a lot of interesting gameplay and opportunities that can be born out of those six pillars. There’s a lot more we can do, and we’re actively invested in that journey.”
