Yeah, I guess. It seems premature though. It’s not Sony’s MO for acquisitions, although we don’t know what they were shown. It feels a bit random imo.
I think the next big deal SIE is going to do is Capcom. would be the best way to “respond” the acquisition of ATVI. they are very close with Capcom (Square too) seems to be an obvious thing.
Not happening, Sony’s already spent a good portion of its allocated budget for investments and acquisitions (remember, that is spread across all of Sony’s ventures). Even if they hadn’t, Take 2 is well outside the affordability for Sony.
I’m not even sure why some of this “Sony’s going to buy a publisher” rhetoric still exists; with the exception of Bungie, Sony’s acquisitions have all been strategic and cheap.
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I would argue that Bungie acquisition was also strategic.
Of course it was… all acquisitions are, but it wasn’t cheap and is an outlier when it comes to the cost for which Sony has aimed to spend on acquisitions (Haven, for example, was most likely cheaper than Insomniac).
Let me further dispel this notion that Sony’s acquisitions are more noble because they’ve twisted the definition of organic growth to imply something it’s not. Unless you consider closing a studio then buying the rebuilt remains of said studio organic, I suppose.
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I still stick to the opinion that Sony had no choice but to buy Bungie at that point.
You would have to think that, after the Microsoft / Activision + Blizzard + King acquisition, any salable publishers’ price has just gone up substantially. Certainly out of the affordability of Sony. (But probably not of Tencent.)
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We can safely assume that we should take each and every publisher and add 40-50% premium there. So for example Square Enix would be around 10b with bidding involved.
Take 2 would cost around 30b and that’s without Zynga yet.
45 billion plus with having to outbid people like Facebook. It won’t happen.
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If Sony wanted to buy a publisher then of course they could and if Sony wanted to buy Take Two then they could do that also.
They might not have the cash on hand that MS do but they’re not exactly some struggling start up and will do what they believe is best for business and if that means acquiring a publisher, then thats what they’ll do. If anything I’d expect Sony to aquire a publisher before MS does again.
The questions isn’t if they can buy a publisher. It’s if they can outbid successfully the other major players that are all 3 plus times their size for a publisher the others all want. All the deals in the past that Sony has made have been business sense deals. It may not make business sense for them to pay enough of a premium on a massive 0ublisher like Take 2 to win that bidding war.
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So who did Microsoft outbid for Bethesda and Activision?
If you’d read the brief provided by Activision, there were in fact other parties involved, so we don’t know who the other buyers were but we know there were other buyers.
Of course they’re not necessarily a struggling company of course, but they do have a large sum of debt coming due in the short term and we’re talking about a company that has a volatile trajectory over the last decade+…. And one that hasn’t taken out a sizable loan in seven years, with nearly a decade preceding the one before that.
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Sony’s market cap is like 130 billion, I don’t see buying a publisher for more than 1/3 of your entire company’s value as a reasonable move.
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I don’t think so because even Sony has a limit of how much they can spend and they’ve been outbidded in the past. You have to remember they attempted to get Leyou who owns Warframe and got outbid by Tencent. You have to remember with somebody as strong as Take Two up for sale you’ll get into bidding war with the likes of Tencent, Microsoft, and possibly others like Facebook, Amazon, and other tech giants
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I lnow that Kotick tried to take Acti to other prospective buyers i just wasn’t aware of any other recognised bids, i thought MS were really the only contender.
And in regards to Sony, all i am really trying to say is not to discount them out of hand. Playstation is a huge part of Sony’s revitalised success and if they feel that position is going to be threatened then i would expect them to get involved in the acquisition of publishers to help them maintain their market position. Of course it would never be an all cash deal like MS can offer but that’s not the only kind of deal to be done, if anything all cash deals are outliers.
Yeah, I read through that Activision filing and while there were other suitors, I don’t recall any other ones getting to the point of actually putting an offer on the table (it has been a while since I read through it, admittedly). The other party that was closest was the one where Kotick was like “Hey, we have limited time, tell me what you got” and the other party was like “hey, we are iterested but ehhhhh, I cant dance that dance with the information I have”. This was right before the exclusivity period with MS was starting.
When companies have an imperative to get the best value for the stockholder, why would they consider a deal that doesn’t offer the best incentives for the shareholders? This is what we allude to when we’re discussing the ability of Sony to compete with the big tech companies that have cash on hand to purchase any publisher outright with straight cash.
So if it’s a competition between those, Sony may either need to pay considerably more than those companies because cash now is better than cash later or try to sell a merger as the most beneficial option to the company.
Yeah, but the second thing he said was and cheap
…That ain’t Take Two
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Yeah, I mean in those fillings it was mentioned that stakeholders had to consider where they would get bigger returns by owning stocks, rather than just plain cache and so on.