Sonic birds: Sega is buying the creator of mobile game Angry Birds

4/16/23 8:00PM

Sonic birds

‍Japanese gaming company Sega is set to acquire Rovio — the developer behind the wildly successful Angry Birds series of mobile games — for €706m ($776m). The deal, which was first reported to be close to completion on Friday, is the latest in a flurry of dealmaking in the gaming industry in recent years, and will bring Rovio's mobile-first expertise to the list of storied franchises at Sega, which includes Sonic the Hedgehog and numerous arcade games.

‍Slingshot to the top

‍‍Rovio was one of the first developers to slingshot its way to the top of the nascent app stores with the original Angry Birds, a game in which players throw (ironically wingless) birds at structures in a bid to try and remove all of the pigs from the screen. That simple mechanic turned out to be highly addictive and it spawned a wave of free physics-based games on mobile… transforming the Finland-based Rovio from indie studio to mobile game maestro in just a few months.

The company, which now has ~550 employees, claims that Angry Birds was the first mobile game to be downloaded more than a billion times. However, Rovio has never really been able to reproduce the breakout success of Angry Birds, instead relying on releasing new versions and spin-offs of the same game. In fact, Rovio has since released dozens of games under the Angry Birds name — including collaborations with Star Wars and Transformers — and the franchise still accounts for more than 80% of the company’s games revenue, more than 13 years since its initial release.

‍Rovio's share price is up ~18%on the news of the acquisition, but it remains below its 2017 IPO price.

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

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While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5