Sony has like $45 billion on hand my dude.

Besides, what is cash, really, when you're smart about it? AMD has $3 billion on hand and bought Xilinx for $35 billion...

AMD made that purchase all with stocks too, IIRC.

We just saw Take Two acquire Zynga, which is more than half their market, but Sony isn't capable of buying a few publishers lol?

The level of risk you incur with a stock based transaction is significantly higher than a cash deal, and leave Sony as a whole more vulnerable to fluctuating market conditions. To acquire a publisher via a stock or debt transaction when so many other Sony ventures require capital would not be ideal for Sony leadership and would frankly be an option of last resort 

I don't think you understand what "cash in hand" means. It is literally not possible to have negative cash in hand. That cash is used for paying salaries, rent, tax, utilities, electricity, etc. That cash includes what they have in the bank and can immediately access. They will definitely not spend all of it, but cash in hand doesn't mean they can spend all of it however they choose.

https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/cash-on-hand

https://www.accountingtools.com/articles/days-cash-on-hand.html

https://investory.io/cash_on_hand/#:~:text=The%20Cash%20on%20Hand%20KPI,day%20of%20the%20reporting%20period.

Sony has enough money to cover almost four years of their operating expenses. Besides, it's not like their continuous operations are running at a loss.

Microsoft, the trillion-dollar company whose financial health depends far less on Xbox than Sony depends on SIE, literally spent half their cash on hand to buy A-B. When someone in the industry makes a power play like this the other companies are forced to answer, even if it takes them out of their comfort zone...

I've said this in another thread, so I'll summarize it here. Sony can't buy Square. They don't have the liquidity to do it
Square's market cap (according to Google) is 689 billion yen. In just cash, Sony has 1.473 trillion yen. However, this is split between all of Sony's departments. If you take out Sony Financial Services, they only have 874 billion yen. This means Sony would either have to go into debt or spend all their cash to buy Square. Even if they do a half cash, half stock deal, then it's still costing them 345 billion yen, and would only leave all of Sony's divisions (sans Financial Services) with 529 billion yen. One thing to keep in mind is Sony does not have a lot of liquidity, so to lose this much cash puts them at a pretty big risk. Also, Sony has a lot of short term debt (1.478 trillion which is more than the cash they have on hand) and a decent amount of long term debt. They don't have the money to throw around.

Moreover, if Sony did this, you'd see Nintendo and probably Microsoft throw their hat into the ring to prevent this from happening. Nintendo has 1.07 trillion yen and has far more liquid assets (securities and CDs) than Sony does, so they could throw more money around than Sony could, if a buy out was possibility. Not to mention they have less debt. They also have a lot to lose if Sony bought Square, since Nintendo pushes for Dragon Quest, has smaller developers that make third party content for them (Octopath/Braverly Default) and legacy content (and Smash I guess). So even if Sony could do it, they'd likely get outbid in the end.

By the by, there is a reason why you haven't seen Sony make a lot of big acquisitions, or many acquisitions to begin with.

Source: https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/presen/er/pdf/21q2_sony.pdf

So... Sony is Doomed?

Depends on your definition. They aren’t going anywhere as a business, but their days as the undesputed market leader are probably numbered 

Its not ideal, but Microsoft just spent nearly 70B on Activision Blizzard, why wouldn't Sony prioritize the Playstation division now? Every other division but Sony Interactive has got a major investment in the last couple of years: 

Sony Financial Holdings (3.7B)
Sony Music EMI acquisition (2.3B)
SonyZee merger (1.6B)
Crunchyroll (1B+)

Sony even invested 9B+ towards their image sensors over the course of three years. Also, stock based transactions isn't the only method Sony has when it comes to acquisitions, its just an example of what they could leverage for an acquisition, as AMD & Take Two have demonstrated. 

How would you explain Sony putting aside 18.3B+ to invest for their midrange plan if they don't have money to throw around?