No, they cannot spend that much. It goes beyond than just what the company is worth and this conversation is too stupid and childish to continue.

I agree, platform holders shouldnt gain control over massive 3rd party assets no matter the promises or expectations.

I completely forgot about Mojang lol (and Insomniac as well).

Actually there's discussion that the Kadokawa situation accelerated due to a potential hostile takeover by a Korean Corp.

"Kakao (a large South Korean company) has been buying shares in Kadokawa since 2020. It's possible that Kadokawa approached Sony on an acquisition to prevent a hostile takeover. This may also explain why this deal leaked (so Kakao stops buying shares). "

https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/1gw0h71/kadokawa_may_have_approached_sony_to_prevent_a/

Either ways, gonna be a paradigm shift for the Anime industry.

I dont think MS would bluff about CoD, too much of a risk for them and I dont think removing Elden Ring would be comparable, pretty much everyone who wants ER has it and the frequency of releases or amount of sales isnt comparable to CoD.

“this conversation is too stupid and childish” eh. I think maybe it was more that my response was a little too childish. My bad.

One last comment: There are some acquisition which, upon being adjusted for inflation, hit levels of $300-400bil. Microsoft is the wealthiest company in the world: They could certainly afford it. If other companies could, then Microsoft can.

Interesting. Whoever Kakao is, they must be huge. On a related note: would you look at that Kadokawa stock price jump! Is this related to the acquisition news or are there other aspects involved?

A bluff from MS won't damage CoD at all provided Sony starts the fight. But yes, nothing Sony takes off Xbox can hurt combined software sales all that much, because Xbox is just not that big of a platform. I think a bluff is enough to force Sony to keep the biggest FromSoftware titles on Xbox.

"Elden Ring' (including a hypothetical "Elden Ring 2", or whatever FromSoftware is cooking to succeed it) is nowhere near CoD big when you remember that CoD is annual and also massive in the F2P scene. But it would still be Sony's most valuable asset and a tool they can use to influence decisions.

An "Xbox exclusive CoD" would benefit the Xbox platform a whole lot more than a "PS exclusive CoD' benefits Playstation. But conversely, it would sell much worse and hurt the CoD brand at least in the short to medium term. I doubt a 3 month exclusivity would hurt it though. I'd argue the business benefits of timed-exclusivity outweigh the negatives in this case.

The fact of the matter is Sony is too obsessed about CoD to entertain the thought of losing it, whether it's a bluff or otherwise. Fortunately for them, CoD is contract bound to stay on Playstation for several years, so MS doesn't yet have the negotiation upper hand.

Some estimated hardware numbers for EU Oct from Resetera suggests:
PS5: 232K
Switch: 99k
XB: 25K

Alco, COD BO6 sales were up this year on PS, if I read correctly.

COD ain't leaving PS anytime soon regardless of whatever contract may or may not be in place. Entertaining the idea is foolish because there's just too much money on the table for MS to do it, and I highly doubt MS is going to risk the possibility of a non-PS version meaning an explosion in sales for the Xbox version.

MS's current issue isn't whether From games stop releasing on Xbox or not: it's how to ensure that their userbase is still purchasing games in addition to owning a gamepass subscription. If they ain't buying, then it wouldn't matter if From games released on Xbox or not. They most assuredly aren't hitting Gamepass in any reasonable timeframe either.

Sony weighs bid for Kadokawa and its IPs

"

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.

I see you guys are having fun talking about Kadokawa lol so here are my two cents:

- If it happens FromSoft games won't be exclusive: It would be the same Aniplex situation, Aniplex is a japanese Sony company and they almost exclusively publish games for the Switch. They are also owners of Fate/Grand Order one of the biggest japanese gachas in the world and there wasn't any reports or rumor of annexing it to PS even when PS has a mobile division (lol).

- There won't be any creative impositions: When Sony acquired Bungie the plan was to let them do whatever they wanted for whatever platform they wanted, they knew Bungie was working in 6 games and none of them were canceled until ... the Bungie bubble popped and all the internal problems came to the light. Still of those 6 projects only one was canceled.

I'm not saying it would be good if it happens tho, smaller and small companies should exist.
The real problem is about morality we all know that but it's little we can do in the world of big time money.

15 million Helldivers! Announced by ArrowHead in the Golden Joystick Awards.

Reviewbombing couldn't stop the fight for freedom.

Helldivers and the Monke sales saving Sony's yearly ass after the Concord failure. Still I'm happy they nuked that studio, a lot of money wasted.

A lot of this depends on how they were to integrate Kadokawa into Sony. 

I think keeping them under Sony Music like they do with Aniplex would lead to the situation you're talking about. 

If they did it more by pieces, and had gaming under Sony Interactive, things could be different. But that doesn't seem very likely to me. Certainly not in the short term. 

Hopefully CoD stays multiplat (and same with anything FromSoftware) - I agree a 3-6 month exclusivity deal isnt too bad.

Kakao seems to be a lot of subsidiaries - and a gaming one where they focus on mobile, pc and vr.  The only big known IP they had was Black Desert Online but they sold rights to it a decade ago, everything else seems like the typical MMO/online/MP game you would see mainstream.

https://kakaogames.com/en-us

Apparently they have their own store like GOG and Steam but offer some other services I think : https://game.daum.net/