Rovio
More info
- Creator
- Niklas Hed, Jarno Väkeväinen, Kim Dikert
- Released
- 2003
- Owner
- Sega (since 2023)
- Type
- Mobile game developer
Finnish studio that made fifty-odd forgettable games and then Angry Birds, one of the first big hits of the smartphone era.
Three students from Helsinki University of Technology in Espoo won a mobile game contest run by Nokia and HP and founded the company as Relude in 2003. For six years it mostly did work-for-hire and came close to folding. Angry Birds reached the iPhone in December 2009: birds, a slingshot, green pigs and physics you could grasp with one finger. It cost a dollar and was eventually downloaded billions of times.
Rovio then tried to become Disney, with toys, theme parks and two feature films. Nothing else it made came close, and it went through several rounds of layoffs. Sega bought it in 2023 for €706 million. Its Helsinki neighbour Supercell took the opposite route: very few games, each kept alive for years.