Soriku said:
ElGranCabeza said:
All the studios Sony has bought were larger than MM, actually MM is the smallest studio they ever bought with the least amount of games under their belt, either them or Evolution/BigBig. And even though I agree with you and don't think Sony - or Nintendo or Microsoft for that matter - will buy Level 5, nothing is impossible and you shouldn't say it won't happen in a million years. Anything CAN happen, if Sony, MS or Nin offered Hino 2 trillion yen for his company he'd be stupid not to take that. It's just unlikely, especially given that L5 wants to be a big independent 3rd party and is pushing ROID big time, if someone wants to buy them out now they'd have to overpay.
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True, but that was in the past. Right now, like Montana said, they're still in debt and they need to focus on that rather than sinking more money into studios that probably won't help them much considering these studios make many Sony games anyway. MM was just a small acquisition which is why it's acceptable.
Also, the million years thing isn't something that should be taken literally...I'm just saying it's super unlikely. Whenever these "who will Sony buy" thread are made, Level 5 always comes up despite the fact that Level 5 is becoming more and more independent and plus they're selling lots more on the DS anyway, and also the fact that they're hired by third parties like SE to make DQ and I doubt having them bought up would be good for SE either since that'd make them have to go to another dev when sticking with Level 5's been pretty successful. Plus I doubt Level 5 would like to limit themselves that way.
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Sony is in debt? Do you have a link for that? This is a serious question as I was talking about this exact same stuff in another thread. Also you can't talk about "that's in the past" because not even 5 years ago they bought Zipper, if they wanted to they could buy another mid developer like Sucker Punch, RaD or QD in a heartbeat, no doubt.
And I think the biggest argument you can make that L5 wants to stay independent is ROID, I have a feeling ROID will become the Steam of sorts in Japan.
Zipper said:
I know this is VERY VERY VERY unlikely but how much do you think Square Enix would cost? |
Yes it's highly unlikely, but even I can answer this question.
Square Enix market cap is 225.66B Yen or around 2.3 billion dollars, with each share selling at 1961 Yen or around 20 bucks
http://www.google.com/finance?q=TYO:9684
Sony owns around 8% of SE so they already own 18.05B Yen of SE stock, to own all of SE and make them a fully owned subsidiary would cost them over 200B Yen or over U$2 billion, when you buy stock in bulk like that the stock price goes up so they'd have to pay them probably closer to 250-300B Yen or around U$2.5-3 billion. Way overpriced.
To have majority ownership they'd need to buy just about 100B Yen worth of stock, so a little over a billion, with stock markup, around U$1.2 billion dollars, just about what they paid for BMG's 50% of Sony BMG. More feasible but way too unlikely to even consider IMO.
