What makes you believe that? Microsoft almost bought Square in the past.
And it fell through. Square have a great thing going with Sony and Playstation. They are making a lot of money through this.
They wont sell the entire thing to MS who they barely work with.
The Western side sure, as its been a failure
Folks care, what they don’t care is a big company who refuses to have a consistent multiplatform release and has been only on Xbox mostly as “we do if we are paid for it” rather than doing what anyone expect from them. These folks care more about Bamco, Capcom, Sega and indies, even Konami keeps the multiplatform releases on Xbox.
Turtle Rock really smashed it with B4B it seems. To me, they should be next
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Sounds like an even better reason to acquire them though
It shows that they were willing to sell the company to Microsoft.
Yeah, but if they decide to sell, the shareholders won’t care about past history, they will care about who bids more money.
The big question is if Square is willing to sell.
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I mean, Bethesda was making 2 PS timed exclusives before they were acquired. As i said, past and present relations get thrown out of the window when the topic is acquisitions.
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There has to be a strong working partnership with the studios, directors etc. Convincing the shareholders to go with people they dont know would be impossible
With Sonys help, SE JPN are making great profit, hence why they wont go with MS
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They really dont, especially where MS are concerned. They are all about that relationship
The shareholders don’t care about anything beyond how they are getting compensated.
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What? If you are selling a company why would a shareholder care about anything except who bids more? It’s not like the future of the company is going to matter to them as they are already selling their stocks.
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Sounds more like a reason why you would focus on putting your partners first, Sony wants to flex with Final Fantasy, yet, Microsoft owns Zenimax whose games have been bigger successes than SE output with exception that they aren’t the lead on MMORPG race like FFXIV. Most of the western former partners and devs + CD are already doing first party work for Microsoft, unless that means a better relation with SE JP, it feels more they will just be partners with the former workplace of Gallagher and has no interest in wooing the rest of the company anymore.
Final Fantasy XIV for Xbox still on plans, but that’s a low priority and was promised all way back in 2019, while FF Origin seems to be a multiplat because either Sony dropped or Koei Tecmo was very willingly having it multiplatform.
Fun fact, one of the shareholders was Robert Trump and he was considered the only roadblock for Microsoft acquiring Bethesda sooner, he died a month before the deal was announced. I wonder if he had the influence over the sudden change of mood, especially that both games weren’t announced as exclusives.
People want to make up reasons why Square Enix can’t happen, but the reality is that if they are willing to sell then Xbox should be ready to buy
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They would never be willing to sell though, not to MS anyway.
I mean they completly ignore Xbox platforms on the most part.
Whether they are willing to sell and whether MS should buy are two different discussions that people tend to merge.
MS absolutely should buy, closing the deal in another story.
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As I said, if they are willing to sell they will sell to the highest bidder, as every other public company acquisition.
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Why does it make more sense to acquire the company that you are going to get games from as opposed to the one you aren’t.
It doesnt work like that. SE and MS dont work together, the dev teams have no partnership with MS, and vice versa.
People make it sound like all you have to do is dump a load of money and thats it the studio is yours. Negotiations happen etc
The main studio directors have to be convinced to join as well, if not they leave and SE lose all the talent.
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Because you want security that these deals will benefit, not harm you, if the top ups of the target company doesn’t care about your objectives and products, you wouldn’t consider to have them still on charge if you acquired it. That’s also why grubb said about “Trying out” developers, they want to see if they can foster a good relationship, not a negative one that would jeopardize the products. Some developers are easy to acquire based on a good days/weeks long talks and details, others want to try out to see if it works at a term.
If just “why acquire X companies who will just release the games anyway” well the Zenimax deals with PS are one year only, Square Enix has broken the deal expiration date and instead seems to have extended it. Why bother to buy most of the studios if they were going to release the games on Xbox anyway eh?
Exactly, you want the guys and IP on board, not a major walk out.
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