Good morning, how about a nice big bowl of your favourite breakfast cereal: Corporate Consolidation? Sony are in talks to buy Kadokawa, the parent company of Elden Ring developer From Software. Sony is eyeing up the company as a hefty snack because they want the various manga and anime owned by Kadokawa, according to a report by Reuters. But also because they want all the tasty games owned by them too, such as the Danganronpa series, the Octopath Traveler games, and the biggest corn flake of them all, the Dark Souls series.
Talks between the companies are continuing, Reuters was told, and a deal might be finalised “in the coming weeks”. The game studios owned by Kadokawa include not just From Software but also Spike Chunsoft (the Danganronpa people), Gotcha Gotcha Games (who do the RPG Maker engines), Acquire (the Octopath Traveler and Tenchu owners) and Vic Game Studios (makers of the Black Clover mobile games). Owning the Dark Souls developer would also give Sony the publishing rights to the third-person mech marauding of Armored Core and swordy soulslike Sekiro.
These all make sense for a gaming company to own, but it is also a further slurping of studios down the megacorp gullet. Sony being the owners of Fromsoft also puts them in a position to pull a Bloodborne and make the next Souls game a PlayStation exclusive. But true console exclusives are a rarity these days – publishers prefer to make exclusives time-limited and eventually release on as many machines as possible. And we on PC have been getting almost everything from Sony in recent years, if after a little wait. It’s likely the follow-up to Elden Ring won’t be quite as big in size, but it probably will still sell like masochistic hot cakes.
As for Kadokawa, they were hit by a ransomware cyberattack this summer, from which they seem to have recovered, and have more recently confirmed that they have a combined 26 game projects in development across all the studios they own. Those games will now likely be Sony’s. Maybe one of them will make back the $200 million Sony lost on Concord.