Rovio To Launch An Educational Angry Birds

Finland’s Rovio Entertainment has partnered with Washington-based game developer Legends of Learning to launch new Angry Birds games with a focus on education.

Based on the Angry Birds characters, the games will teach STEM concepts—such as force, collisions and how to measure angles—to kids ages five to 14. The Legends of Learning online platform will release the games this fall.

Launched in 2017, Legends of Learning is a learning hub for elementary and middle school students. Game-based learning improves children’s grades, says Legends of Learning CEO and co-founder Vadim Polikov. The platform, which contains more than 2,000 educational video games, is mostly free but also offers paid options for teachers. It also allows kids to customize avatars by paying a subscription. It’s used by about 10 million teachers and students in the US, according to a release.

Rovio has long seen its Angry Birds games—which have been downloaded over five billion times—as a potential educational tool. The company previously expanded the games into education through a partnership with the University of Helsinki, which focused on creating games that blended fun with learning. And in 2014, it launched a standalone venture called Fun Academy to create educational games. 

Rovio has lately been expanding beyond its core focus of making games. It’s now producing a series for Amazon Kids+ and Prime Video titled Angry Birds Mystery Island.  Meanwhile, Japanese game developer SEGA is in the midst of acquiring Rovio in a US$776 million deal.

SEGA To Acquire Angry Birds Company Rovio

Sega, the Japanese-headquartered video game company best known in the West for its Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, is acquiring Angry Birds developer Rovio, the companies announced today. The Finnish headquartered mobile games developer will be acquired for €706 million (around $775 million), which The Wall Street Journal notes represents a roughly a 19 percent premium over its share price at close on Friday. The deal is expected to close by the end of September.

In a press release, Sega said it hopes to use “Rovio’s distinctive know-how in live service mobile game operation, to bring Sega’s current and new titles to the global mobile gaming market.” It sounds like a similar aim to what Sega’s rival Nintendo has been doing with its franchises, with smartphone releases like Mario Kart Tour, Pokémon Go, and Super Mario Run. Sega also wants to help Rovio “expand its platform outside of mobile gaming.”

“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,” said Haruki Satomi, president and group CEO of Sega parent company Sega Sammy holdings. In a statement, Rovio CEO Alexandre Pelletier-Normand specifically called out the company’s Beacon platform, which is designed to help develop games-as-a-service products.

Rovio is best known for its work on the Angry Birds franchise, which launched in 2009 and is claimed to be the first mobile game series to have reached 1 billion downloads. In total, Rovio says its games have been downloaded over 5 billion times. Angry Birds has since been adapted for the big screen twice (once in 2016 and again in 2019), but more recent entries in the franchise have struggled to make a similar impact.

Sega isn’t the first company to have expressed an interest in acquiring Rovio. The mobile game developer had previously been in discussions to be acquired by Israel-based Playtika, but talks officially came to an end in March 2022. Rovio has been a publicly traded company since 2017. 

Rovio’s acquisition by Sega is the latest example of an independent mobile gaming titan being hoovered up by a more traditional games giant. Candy Crush developer King was acquired by Activision Blizzard in a $5.9 billion deal that completed in 2016 while Zynga, the company behind FarmVille, was bought by Take-Two for $12.7 billion last year.