From where I'm sitting, no matter how good a game WKC may turn out, it seems unlikely it'll be a commercial smash hit tbh.

A lot of you are thinking it would cost Sony $5 billion to buy L5 like it was to buy 20% of MGM.....if I had to guess I would say it would cost them no more than $100 million (and that's high IMO), remember they paid $600 million out of pocket (plus $300 million from Sony BMG side) to buy pretty much 12% of the music industry and Sir Howard Stringer said the reason they did it was because it made sense and it would not break the bank to do so.

The problem with acquiring developers is that:

1) You have to make sure the talent and creative minds stay there and not leave, otherwise you're left with just a bunch of IPs

2) You now have more costs because of new employees and contractors, so you wanna make sure that long term cost is gonna pay off in the end.

Unfortunately, I agree.

@ OP - Real journalists use good grammar and spelling. In which case, I would describe these as blogging sites and ignore this rumour :P

Yeah.   I mean all you really need to buy a privately owned developer is enough money to let the owners go "Cha-ching".

Millions upfront... that for once you don't have to reinvest in your buisness...

As a co-worker of mine would say "That's a bueatiful thing."

The only downside is you won't have as much control as you used too...

but if it sucks and you keep most of your millions in the bank you can always leave and start up a new company.

First and foremost, it's not illegal.  Just like if you tell a girl you are 14" and you are not, she can't win a judgment against you for lying about your manhood... she'll just kick you out of bed.  I know law because I get sued about 20 times a year because of the business I'm in, so you are better off not arguing law with me.

Secondly, a good example is this very week... MS declared they had beat Sony in console sales 3:1 when the fact was that they beat them about 2:1.  Not bad numbers by any means, but they were 500,000 consoles off in their sales numbers.

Manufacturers have always lied about sales numbers to cause buzz about their product.  It's PR BS, and everyone does it.  Hell, I have my employees do it everyday... it's part of business.

To be fair, Sony's behavior in the past years makes it seem like they're a financially strong company, which is why many people mistake them for one. That's what fuels the illusions that the party at SCE will continue through 2009 and beyond.

Well, never say never... it's still possible that the party will go on as it recently has, but it's increasingly unlikely.

Nothing like a good recession to take the water away from the beach. Now we can see who was naked under the high tide.

Your analogy doesn't really work because you're dealing with 2 people, not companies dealing with investors. if MS outsold Sony 2.5 - 1, then they just round up to the nearest integer, which is still legal, plus they can always say their "Europe" is different than "Sony" Europe. If they tried to say that with shipped numbers then it would be illegal, i.e. they could not say we sold 3 million and Sony sold 1 million, they would have to say we sold 2.5 million and Sony sold 1 million.

What you're suggesting is illegal, Namco cannot say they shipped 2 million copies of SCIV if they only shipped 1.6 million copies, that is illegal. No ifs about it.

Sony has always been a financial strong company until about 3 years ago what with the buying of MGM and Blu Ray and Cell costs and stuff like that, I know you love hating Sony, but at least be realistic. And I'll bet you that SCE will continue through 2009 and beyond.

He said the party at SCE.

As in they'll have all sorts of money to throw around and not have to cut back on anything with the currency change hitting sony pretty hard.

I ellohell'd...out loud.

I'm convinced that they're a joke site, just like SDF. There's no other explanation.

Ah, sorry to interrupt. Carry on, folks.