After Babylon’s Fall and the inevitable bombing of Forspoken I think Sony might back away from throwing money at these Square timed exclusives honestly. Probably just FF.
It will be couple billion dollar acquisition for… Not much in return for Sony. Apparently the Western studios didn’t even add much value to that price.
They don’t have to worry about Square thinking Xbox is too big to not put FF on now, Square is known for taking EGS deals on PC where almost nobody buys games. I also don’t think Sony will be worried about the games being on Xbox 2 years later when the damage is already done.
They’d really just be buying FF… I really don’t think Sony cares about all those small Switch games Square does, Sony didn’t even try to get Octopath Traveler after Xbox got it. And then Square doesn’t even own Kingdom Hearts or Dragon Quest so the most Sony would get out of those is most likely perma marketing rights.
And SE still has a manga and book publishing, and merchandising business that Sony may have not any interest in.
Just a lot of factors that don’t make much business sense to me here.
If Sony DOES get them, honestly, thank god lmao. Big waste of their acquisition budget right there. I’d just hope Nintendo would get Team Asano out of there (Sony wouldn’t want em anyway) and then all is well.
Square Enix now that it’s mainly the Japanese division is the least bad acquisition Sony could make for an Xbox fan. It’s not like y’all were getting their games anyway
WB without IP are not much (Netherrealm aside), SEGA is not happening unless Sega Sammy decides to sell Sega Corp (and they have no reason to) and Capcom is doing better than ever.
From my perspective i would have liked Microsoft to buy them but it is also smart of them to let them go to embracer because they are still a publisher that can be worked with. They can still make deals to have Crystal work the initiative of prefect dark blows up or even start hiring staff away from them.
The other thing I think of is that Microsoft is probably at the point where making defensive bids are probably the smarter move. Them going to embrace or EA or take 2 keeps them in the service. Neither company were doing well by the numbers i saw. They can’t buy everything but putting focus on better bids might be the way for them to go.
I like the way you think, haha. Clearly we don’t want Sony to have too much now, do we?
If they get SE it means we won’t see FF ever again on Xbox, which is anything but a disaster since we already ain’t getting mainline FF anytime soon if ever again anyway. Dragon Quest I don’t know, read today here that someone else owns that IP?
So let them get SE, and with what they got left I guess they could get a WB studio or two, can see that happening, but it should mean they are out of reach of the ones I truly care about like CDPR, Capcom. I wonder what FromSoft would be worth.
WB has an immense amount of talent and that’s worth far more than some of you all are giving them credit for. Did you all collectively forget how Sony paid a billion+ to retain talent? These kinds of statements are pretty baseless when you look at the bevy of studios bought equally for their talent, if not more so in some cases.
Secondly, I don’t know how many shocker acquisitions it’s going to take before people stop making baseless predictions like “x will never sell”.
Well, maybe that’s the reason. I think Netherrealm might be a test for that.
But does that mean that CD and Eidos did not have talent? In case of Bungie the situation was extremely peculiar due to Bungie’s huge expertise in GaaS and old ties with Microsoft so they wanted to retain as much talent as possible.
Bethesda acquisition was shocker because nobody though that Microsoft would buy a publisher at all) but then we learnt that Bethesda had a lot of money issues (we could kinda infer it). So it started to make sense.
ABK deal was a shocker because nobody expected any company to spend 70b on it. But with all ABK issues a lot of people expected the board to try selling it. Just nobody believed that anybody could afford it.
Point me to where I said CD/Eidos didn’t have talent? Not sure why my statement about WB studios, and those purchased with retention bids for talent, is being twisted to imply something I never said. Spare me the whataboutisms.
Bethesda was in dire financial straits for some time and were credibly rumored to be looking at selling, and Activision was in the same situations of turmoil that have forced plenty of other companies to sell (in and out of the gaming industry). The speed in which the acquisitions occurred after said circumstances, and by whom, were most definitely shockers but we’re literally seeing some of the same events happen with other publishers/studios at the moment. As I said last year, the market is in flux with acquisitions being all the rage, in part because it allows poor management to cash out and run.
