According to a report from Reuters, Sony are currently in talks to buy Kadokawa Corporation, the owner of ELDEN RING developer FromSoftware. They also made Armored Core, Dark Souls and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.
Seems like a purchase that would make sense for Sony. Kadokawa are a big name in both Anime and Manga publishing, and with Sony owning Crunchyroll (and Funimation) it would help them expand it even more. Kadokawa also own some huge names in the industry including Spike Chunsoft (Danganronpa), Gotcha Gotcha Games (RPG Maker) and various others.
Reuters said "Sony declined to comment. Kadokawa said it cannot comment." but according to their sources a deal might be signed as soon as a few weeks time.
If Sony do acquire them, this could have a big effect industry-wide. For PC releases, it could even mean seeing more games end up requiring the PlayStation Network account system. That would make sense, as Sony keep pushing that with more recent games, and acquiring more companies to push it even further would also align with their plans to bring more players into their system.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
chickenb00 about 3 hours ago
Last edited by Leahi84 on 19 November 2024 at 4:22 pm UTC
Sony is getting more and more of a monopoly on all things anime, and has been cranking prices to everything they touch for some time now. Really looking forward to $100+ prices on BD anime seasons for nearly everything, when they even get released at all anymore.
Quoting: Leahi84This feels like it should raise red flags Anti-Trust wise. This would totally be investigated in the US and possibly blocked. But I don't know what Japan's monopoly laws are like, if they even have any. What little I do know about them is that corporations seem to control things even more than in the US.I'm no expert on this either, but my impression is . . . yes and no. Corporations in Japan are very powerful, but they are probably a little more constrained by norms of behaviour than in the US. Not nearly as much as they used to be, the strong expectations of paternalism that held in the old days have been stretched to breaking point. But there are things companies could do, like probably the kind of stuff private equity gets up to in the US where they do debt-leveraged takeovers to loot and kill the victim company leaving dysfunction and unemployment in their wake, that in Japan would be considered bad and rocking the boat. And if someone tried doing such things, there would be a lot of informal mechanisms to encourage them not to.
But taking over competitors to strengthen your oligopolistic position in the market probably isn't one of those things the Japanese establishment would object to . . . not sure it ever was.
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me