SEGA and Rovio started dating last April, but they’re finally moving in together.
Earlier this year, SEGA tendered an offer to purchase Rovio Entertainment, the people behind the explosive Angry Birds franchise. With SEGA now owning the IP, it was only a matter of time before they announced some integration and crossovers with their existing properties.
Today, at Roviocon (held in Helsinki by Rovio and Google), Rovio’s new ownership had a presence.
During SEGA’s presentation, the publisher talked about various games they have in the pipeline, according to mobilegamer.biz. This includes some form of crossover between Sonic the Hedgehog and Angry Birds, joking that the two franchises were “dating.”
No other details were given, but it’s easy to speculate that there will be a Sonic the Hedgehog version of Angry Birds, not unlike the old Star Wars iterations. But, the classic Flicky, the birds that are held hostage inside of Sonic's nemesis Dr. Robotnik’s robots, immediately also comes to mind. So, there are a lot of ways they can handle this.
During their presentation, SEGA also talked about other SEGA-owned franchises, such as Persona and Yakuza (or, Like a Dragon). These franchises should expect some mobile treatment soon, which would likely delight their fanbases to have new content.
Shuji Utsumi, SEGA COO and President of Consumer Games and Transmedia, was the main person giving all of these details. While on stage, he also discussed the idea of pushing SEGA products and franchises onto subscription-based services. He talked about Xbox Game Pass but also mentioned Netflix, Apple Arcade, and Roblox.
One last detail that he teased briefly was the long-anticipated Segaverse “super game” that has been in the works since at least 2021. While not much is known about it other than including the entirety of SEGA’s IP catalog in some way, SEGA has stated in the past that they’re willing to put some real cash into it.
During early talks back in 2021, they stated that they’d be willing to invest around 100 billion yen into this super game, which comes out to over $678 million. It’s got to be big. And now, it’ll also include the highly-complained about franchise, Angry Birds.