wow
38 to 11????
:)


who is nintendo close with????

I always thought Level 5 was closer
to ninty then with sony
... guess i was wrong
but they do show a lot of interest
in nintendo as of late

Sony would not have direct influence over the decisions the board of directors makes. Where it's influence would come from is the board of director's wish to keep the a significant shareholder like Sony happy, without annoying other investors.

Here is what I suspect has happened.

Sony: "Help us out here"

SE: "We'll keep FFXIII and Versus exclusive but you have to shut up and let us do what we want with everything else."

Sony: "We'll do whatever you want, just put out FFXIII ASAP"

Yeah.  Funny thing about the Square-Enix merger.

Enix was the more successful company... in fact they were really hesitant to merge with square. 

Just thinking about the timeline of FF13 and PS2/PS3 shows how unlikely and dumb that is.

 FF13 and Versus were exclusives long before PS3 even came out while the exclusivity of future FF games will depend on their sales.

How do you vote with nonvoting stock? Unless they got voting rights in the merger?  Which would make like... no sense.

As I recall the 20% they bought in square was non voting stock. Part of the deal, that was really just a cash flush for Square who was hurting after bad buisness decisions.

All sony could do is threaten to unload it all in one move hurting their short term stock prices.

All of the actual voting shares still are in the hands of the founders of Square and Enix.

You can have 48% of the stock and if it's all nonvoting you ain't got any say in anything. The stock sale was just a way for Sony to bail out square when they were in financial straights in return for short term game support.

Does anyone know for sure that Sony still owns any of Square-Enix? Was their stock listed on Sony's balance sheet in their last financial statement?

I'm not saying that they don't own Square-Enix stock anymore, but I just don't see the point in them holding it any longer. Back in the day, Squaresoft was in serious financial trouble after they released Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and lost a fortune on it; this was somewhat unfortunate because the movie was fairly good, and probably would have been more successful had it not had the "Final Fantasy" name associated with it. This financial trouble meant that Squaresoft was at risk to be bought by a larger company like Nintendo or Microsoft; Sony bought Squaresoft's stock (from Squaresoft directly if I remember correctly) in order to increase the value of Squaresoft's stock and to protect against an attempt from Nintendo/Microsoft to buy Squaresoft.

Today, after dozens of remakes and rereleases of games, Square-Enix's bottom line is healthy and they're beyond the size of a company that Nintendo/Microsoft would want to buy; and Sony's expenses from UMD, PSP, Blu-Ray and the PS3 means that Sony would probably want to liquidate the stock.

Sony pics and their electronics division have been making a killing, they also did unload their chip manafacturing and their finencial division. Theres no reason to think Sony would liquidate that stock other then fanboy stupidity.

Some of you fanboys are so scared and whats quite sickening you are jealous of Sony's tiny 8% yet at the end of the day sure Sony has some influence over SE but they dont have any control over SE at all.

 Please, PLEASE tell me this is a joke post.

(Coming out of retirement, just to make this joke.)

Musashi Miyamoto, the famed sword fighter and author, owns 7%.