What?! You don't know? Sony bailed out SE (then Squaresoft) during their crisis after the Spirits Within debacle, which nearly rendered the company bankrupt. I think more shares were shifted towards the company's british part as well during this (Square Enix was just Squaresofts british division, right? Can't quite remember).

The saddest thing in all this, is that I own Spirits Within on DVD... (shudder)...  

 Not sad owing FF-SW. It's still a great movie, it just sucked that it didn't relate much to the games ie weapons, summons etc.

.....

Why? Why would MS buy out Square Enix? They don't have to.

It's far cheaper for them to build their own studios (Mistwaker) from old SE employees rather than just buy out another company. For the userbase, Blue Dragon did insanely well, and helped the X360 almost as much as a Final Fantasy would, but at a faction of the cost of buying SE to make a game for them.

Really, the only thing MS needs is to forge more relationships with JRPG developers - Atlus, Taito, SE, Nippon Ichi, Sega, Namco, and so on to build more RPGs for them. 100 million USD in moneyhats would bring much bigger profits from spreading the love, rather than spending billions on Square Enix. Heck, I doubt Mistwaker's current budget is barely a fraction of what it's taking to build FFXIII (Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey were well under $50m together. A good deal if you ask me for what BD has already done for the X360 in Japan).

 I agree, its unneccessary and it would be stupid. Good point about the moneyhats

Never gonna happen! Sony owns 8,58% of Square Enix' shares!!! They are officially the third biggest shareholders of SE. The bigger shares are held by banks.

It's easy to make claims like Microsoft could buy this and that. So it's pretty useless to make claims like that unless you have proof. They have enough funds to buy out Sony and Nintendo for that matter! Actually before Microsoft tried to buy out Nintendo. But Nintendo wisely choose their own path. But because Nintendo needed the money badly because the gamecube almost killed them, they sold their shares in Rare instead at an offer they couldn't refuse.

 Lol, I remeber that! When bungie first started ot making games like Marathon, they were all Mac, but Microsoft saw the Halo trailer and released that would be great on their system, they bought bungie for a disgustingly small amount if I recall correctly.