Angry Birds Maker Rovio Acquires Futuremark's Game Studio

By Douglas Perry
published

Rovio, developer of the wildly successful Angry Birds series, said that it has acquired Futuremark Games Studio, the video game development business of benchmark maker Futuremark.

Rovio said that the purchase will support its strategy of rapidly expanding in "entertainment, publishing, animation and retail." Futuremark CEO Jukka Mäkinen said that his company will now focus on its 3D Mark benchmark, which will be released in a new version later this year and enable a "unified gaming performance comparison across operating systems and form factors for the first time."

Rovio, founded in 2003 as Relude and renamed to Rovio Mobile in 2005, claims that its Angry Birds games have been downloaded more than 500 million times. Besides Angry Birds, Rovio has developed more than 30 other titles, primarily for J2ME and, since 2008, for N-gage, iOS, Android, WebOS, Symbian, Windows, Mac OS X, Chrome, Windows Phone 7, Wii U, Nintendo 3DS and the PlayStation Vita since 2008.

Futuremark Games Studio is the second major acquisition of the developer. Last summer, Rovio bought Kombo Animation.

Douglas Perry
20 Comments Comment from the forums
  • johnsmithhatesVLC
    "How much fps do you get in Angry Birds?"
    Reply
  • nforce4max
    The end of an era I suppose.
    Reply
  • djtronika
    400,000FPS = *EAGLE ACHIEVEMENT ACHIEVED!
    Reply
  • what possible interest does rovio have in futuremark

    make the future of pc gaming based off angry birds?
    Reply
  • unksol
    I get 3d mark scores are a joke. and angry birds is a joke ripped off a flash game... so they have that in common. but futuremark is a benchmark of sorts.... its destroyed by being associated with rovio..... you just have to laugh at someone who uses a bench mark backed by angry birds.
    Reply
  • ramon1
    eeeee122323what possible interest does rovio have in futuremarkmake the future of pc gaming based off angry birds?
    That's the harsh reality, the future of gaming is casual gaming.
    Reply
  • darkavenger123
    Coming Soon...Angry Bird 3D on PC....

    Min Requirement:
    i7
    8GB RAM
    Radeon 7970 or whatever top of the line GPU.
    24" LED TouchScreen Monitor

    Features:
    3D Angrybird with 10million poly per bid.
    Real feathers
    Fluffing feathers
    Texturized bird shit with HDR lightning
    PhysX and Havok support
    Multiplayer options
    DLC content

    Future:
    Kinect Support


    So there you have it....
    Reply
  • I see who the real pigs are :p
    Reply
  • razor512
    I wonder what they will truly gain from buying that company. The engines used in 3dmark have always been inefficient (they are hard to run and the graphics are not even close to what a modern high end PC game can do)

    The only thing I can see this doing is increasing the system requirements of the games with out making them look much better. or doing wasteful things like 16k 32 bit uncompressed textured air with tessellation, HDR, particle physics, ray tracing, with all at 100% transparency since you are not suppose to be able to see the air (but at least you will know that the air be behaving like real air)

    Reply
  • Hey guys, Futuremark just sold their game studio to Rovio but not whole company.
    Reply