Posts Tagged: Sega
Sega completes purchase of Rovio for $776 million
Sega Sammy has completed its purchase of Angry Birds developer Rovio, officially plunking down a cool $ 776 million to acquire the company. The deal was first floated back in April, but both companies had to jump through some finalization and regulatory hoops. Sega’s hoping the purchase will give them a stronger foothold in the mobile space, despite the golden days of Angry Birds fandom passing almost 15 years ago.
However, Rovio is not just the one IP. Beyond Angry Birds and its many spinoff games, the company is known for the match-three puzzler Sugar Blast and the narrative mystery title Small Town Murders. Okay, those aren’t exactly high-profile IPs, but Sega gets something beyond recognizable franchise titles with this purchase. It gets a ready-made infrastructure for developing, publishing and advertising mobile games. This means it can hit the ground running when making mobile titles based on its own IPs, like Sonic, Samba de Amigo, Persona, Football Manager and others. There’s also hundreds of older games just waiting for mobile ports.
Back in April, CEO Haruki Satomi said that “the mobile gaming market has especially high potential, and it has been Sega's long-term goal to accelerate its expansion in this field.”
Beyond Sega’s pre-existing franchises, the company will likely continue with more Angry Birds mobile games. Despite losing some of that late 2000s luster, Angry Birds is still a fairly hot commodity, with related movies, TV shows and even a bizarre restaurant in New York City. Maybe pairing up those annoyed avians with a certain blue hedgehog will bring the one-time mobile smash back into the collective consciousness. Now, who’s up for flinging Knuckles into a bunch of pigs?
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/sega-completes-purchase-of-rovio-for-776-million-191525883.html?src=rss
Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
SEGA confirms the purchase of many Angry Birds (also Rovio)
When Angry Birds first appeared on the Play Store, it was a revelation in terms of casual gameplay, graphics, and just plain cuteness. Who could resist putting those naughty piggies back in their place by catapulting an Angry Bird into their buildings? As time went on, Angry Birds creator, Rovio, produced a slew of games, […]
Come comment on this article: SEGA confirms the purchase of many Angry Birds (also Rovio)
Sega left one of its European servers wide open
What could have been a damaging breach in one of Sega's servers appears to have been closed, according to a report by security firm VPN Overview. The misconfigured Amazon Web Services S3 bucket contained sensitive information which allowed researchers to arbitrarily upload files to a huge swath of Sega-owned domains, as well credentials to abuse a 250,000-user email list.
The domains impacted included the official landing pages for major franchises, including Sonic the Hedgehog, Bayonetta and Total War, as well as the Sega.com site itself. VPNO was able to run executable scripts on these sites which, as you can imagine, would have been quite bad if this breach had been discovered by malicious actors instead of researchers.
An improperly stored Mailchimp API key gave VPNO access to the aforementioned email list. The emails themselves were available in plaintext alongside associated IP addresses, and passwords that the researchers were able to un-hash. According to the report, "a malicious user could have distributed ransomware very effectively using SEGA’s compromised email and cloud services."
So far there's no indication that bad actors made use of this vulnerability before VPNO discovered and helped Sega to fix it. Sega Europe was not available for comment.
Misconfigured S3 buckets are, unfortunately, an extremely common problem in information security. Similar errors this year have impacted audio company Sennheiser, Senior Advisor, PeopleGIS, and the government of Ghana. Sega was the target of a major attack in 2011 which led to the exfiltration of personally identifiable information pertaining to 1.3 million users. Thankfully, this misconfigured European server didn't result in a similar incident.
Sega will still release ‘Judgment’ worldwide despite actor’s arrest
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Ben Heck’s Sega Saturn teardown
By popular request, Ben is tearing down the retro Sega Saturn games console. Back in the day, the Saturn was Sega's attempt to compete against Sony's PlayStation, even though it already had a CD-based console add-on for the Genesis / Mega Drive i…
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USB-powered Sega Nomad gives you near-endless game time
Sega's Genesis Nomad was always something of a compromise (it was running 16-bit console games on mid-1990s handheld tech), but the battery life was a particularly sore point: it took six AA batteries just to get 3 hours of play time. Wouldn't it be…
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Sega is ‘investigating’ a ‘Shenmue’ HD remaster
Shenmue fans may have some significant announcements to look forward to from Sega if all goes well. The company, when responding to a recent fan question about possible HD remasters of the Dreamcast's seminal 1999 role-playing game Shenmue and its 20…
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