Rovio, the Finnish company that created the “Angry Birds” game, will open its first headquarters in southern Europe in Barcelona during the first half of 2023, where it plans to generate more than 30 jobs.
Rovio Barcelona will specialize in the development of new levels, experiences and mechanics for video games such as Angry Birds Dream Blast and Angry Birds Friends.
To do so, it will hire graphic artists, designers and developers, among other profiles that will work in coordination with the company’s headquarters in Finland.
Matthieu Burleaux, senior director of Rovio, assured that the company has “ambitious growth plans” in which the Catalan capital will play a very prominent role.
In fact, the city is a major hub of professional talent for the development of mobile video games.
Although they considered different locations, they finally chose Barcelona because it is a source of talent and because it is located in a time zone reasonably close to that of Finland.
The creator of the game “Angry Birds”.
Rovio was founded in 2003. Currently, the video game specialist company has a workforce of more than 500 employees located in different cities around the world.
It also has studios in Copenhagen (Denmark), Stockholm (Sweden), Montreal and Toronto (Canada) and a subsidiary in Turkey.
As it has been listed since 2017, it is looking to expand and continue on an ambitious growth path that will allow it to make a presence in Southern Europe.
Being in this area gives the company a great recruitment potential and allows the incorporation of human talent.
Currently, Rovio’s mobile games have accumulated around 5 billion downloads.
However, the most famous has been Angry Birds which was launched in 2009 and has been evolving ever since.
Rovio’s arrival in Barcelona
The opening of the headquarters in the city has been supported by Acció, the agency for business competitiveness of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
For his part, Roger Torrent, Minister of Enterprise, stressed that Rovio’s arrival in the Catalan capital is an “example of the dynamism that the video game sector has been experiencing” in Catalonia.
The goal is to attract more investment in the technology and video game sectors.
According to a study by Acció, Catalonia is the first region in the European Union with the highest attraction of foreign investment in the video games sector.
In fact, the report indicates that in the last five years, 20 new projects have been attracted, representing an investment of 120 million euros and the creation of almost 900 jobs.
Rovio joins another project of the Danish IO Interactive, which will create 150 new jobs in its Barcelona studio over the next four years.
