Sony could soon be acquiring FromSoftware’s parent company, according to a report by Reuters.
Kadokawa Corporation is home to some pretty major developers, including Danganronpa’s Spike Chunsoft and Octopath Traveler’s Acquire, and has almost a 70% stake in too-many-bangers-to-list studio FromSoftware. It’s not just games, either, as the media conglomerate also owns Niconico, which is essentially Japan’s alternative to YouTube.
Sony actually already has a very small stake in Kadokawa—2% to be exact—along with shares in FromSoftware which the publisher secured in a deal back in 2022. Now, according to a source for Reuters, Sony is looking to take home the whole pie. It’s allegedly in talks with Kadokawa right now, and a deal could be signed off within weeks if discussions are all fine and dandy.
It doesn’t mean much at all right now, but I do wonder what impact it’ll have if it goes through. For one thing, FromSoftware has a pretty tight working relationship with Bandai Namco, which has published a fairly big chunk of FromSoft’s library and has IP rights to those games. Kadokawa also heads up a sizable amount of anime and manga distribution, which isn’t gaming-related but might still be of interest to Sony: it bought out Funimation in 2017 before acquiring Crunchyroll in 2021, merging the two services together a year later. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was at least some interest in that on Sony’s part.
I’m not exactly one for the alarming increase in industry consolidation—Microsoft’s acquisition carnage has raised multiple eyebrows, and Embracer proved to be ruthless in scooping up multiple companies, only to dump many of them when it landed itself in financial hot water. If the deal does go through, FromSoftware will likely come out of it unscathed, but I wonder what will become of the numerous other operations under Kadokawa’s belt.
