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Sony weighs bid for Kadokawa and its IPs
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What’s at stake: Sony would gain from Kadokawa an immense portfolio of “early phase” IPs that chief financial officer Hiroki Totoki told the Financial Times earlier this year the company lacks.
Three out of four anime properties, in which Sony has accelerated investments, are adapted from other media like manga, light novels, video games, according to an analysis of anime broadcasting data published in 2014."
It also funded an anime production of Oshi no Ko, a manga IP licensed from rival publisher Shueisha, and generated ¥7.6 billion (US$49 million) from sublicenses, allowing the company to buy the anime studio that makes it earlier this year.
Driving the story: Kadokawa and Sony Music subsidiary Aniplex combined invested in about one-third of 321 productions of late-night anime airing in 2022 and 2023, according to a study published at Tokyo’s Comic Market 104 in August.
“That studio created the influential Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls series, as well as 2022’s Elden Ring, one of the best-selling games of the decade with more than 20 million copies sold,” Stephen Totilo, editor of the Game File newsletter, told Animenomics.
Shares of Bandai Namco, which helped publish Dark Souls and Elden Ring, fell on the Tokyo Stock Exchange as investors asked whether Sony could make the studio’s future titles exclusive to PlayStation, but Totilo thinks this isn’t likely.
“More recently, we’ve seen first-party buyers like Sony and Microsoft opt to offer many of the future games from studios they acquire on their own consoles as well as competing ones. The thinking is that the overall volume of sales is more valuable than any of the advantages gained by exclusivity,” Totilo explained.
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