Sony aquires "Insomniac Games"

[DonFerrari]

Hiku said:

starcraft said:

I think there is an inherent contradiction in that statement, given Insomniac games have been producing PS exclusives since PS1 without being purchased.

There are new advantages in the current games market environment to making this purchase, including the PR win in light of Microsoft's recent significant purchases, and the reduction of risk - i.e. while I agree with other posters that the value of Insomniac to MS would be less than their value to Sony, an MS purchase given their current attitude would be impossible to rule out.

We would never know definitively how much Microsoft's recent actions in the market played in to Sony's decision to purchase Insomniac without Sony telling us, which they have no obvious incentive to do (both of these companies are very fond of pretending they don't react to each other's actions). In the current context though, some cognisance of Microsoft in making this purchase can be very reasonably assumed. 

I don't think that's a contradiction, for a few reasons.

Insomniac have gone on record saying they "value their independence" when previously asked about being acquired.
And looking at their past 13 games during this generation, only 2 of them have been PS exclusive. So that makes sense.

I think it's likely they did not want to be purchased before for the price Sony offered them at the time.
But I think what changed was mainly the massive success of Spider-Man, which Insomniac said surprised them. It has now sold over 13m units.

The price for their acquisition is now likely something beyond the value of their independence.

On the subject of PR win, I don't think Sony would need to do anything, until, or unless, the upcoming games from MS's new studios live up to the critical acclaim of Sony's first party studios, and surpasses them. It's subjective, but depending on who you ask, (and Phill Spencer himself said as much) MS are not doing as well in this field as they would have liked, and are still playing catch up. 
And there's no guarantee those upcoming games will be the 'God of War' or 'Spider-Man' that some fans would like to see.

But as CGI mentioned, Sony tend to do this anyway. Naughty Dog was acquired in 2001 for example.

You don't react after the other had success, you need to take preventive measures as well. Because if they wait MS to succeed then they will do what MS done this gen, lose an entire gen to react only on the next.

And in this case Sony isn't making a blind bet.