Angry Birds maker Rovio values itself "north of PopCap"
But admits there's never "been a relevant discussion of whether somebody is going to buy us"
Angry Birds creator Rovio has said that it values its own business higher than the $750 million EA paid for PopCap.
Speaking to our sister site Eurogamer.net, VP of franchise development Ville Heijari said that the company has had preliminary acquisition talks but nothing that has developed into serious offers.
"We've set the bar pretty high from early on, because we really think we have a lot of opportunities with our Angry Birds IP and there's a lot of creativity at the studio beyond Angry Birds. It was never a strategy here to quickly cash in on anybody who comes waving a wad of cash our way," he said.
"But the valuation from our point of view is somewhere, I dunno, maybe north of PopCap."
He added that despite a number of spin-offs to the Angry Birds series, Rovio isn't interesting in milking the franchise and is keen to create new IP as well as continue to grow the business.
"About a year ago, in the summer of 2010, Angry Birds was already quite successful. At that point it started to look like a really, really feasible and desirable IP," continued Heijari.
"So we had a lot of enquiries from many, many different parties. But we've had an overall strategic goal of growing this company and moving into different areas of business beyond games. I don't think there's ever been a really relevant discussion of whether somebody is going to buy us."
The problem with Rovio is that they have only one smash hit product, not two not three but one. So they rely on this ongoing craze for their smash hit product and build everything on it.
One of the problem I see is that it's a roller coaster ride. Today your up, but tomorrow you might be down or even crash. Which would leave them where ? might I ask.
So they say they don't want to cash in on Angry Birds, but they do admit that it's their only successful IP. In fact the way I see it is that they are cashing in as hard as possible, which I believe is fair. Since you never know in this industry when your ride is over, so better make the most of it.
Finally what disturbs me the most, is that in the past 2 years, since they launched angry birds, they failed to launch anything new. Only thing they released were just eye popping updates, basically same brick, in different wrapping.
So it makes me wonder if their bubble will pop or not..
Edited 2 times. Last edit by Fazi Zsolt on 14th July 2011 9:16am
Posted:A year ago