Microsoft had been taking the video game industry by force in recent years. The company made big moves by acquiring Bethesda, and Activision Blizzard. While the latter is yet to be approved by regulators, due to certain concerns, Bethesda already is a Microsoft studio. These two acquisitions almost reach the whopping amount of $80 billion. With the purchase of Bethesda, Microsoft now owns popular franchises such as Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Doom. Once the Activision Blizzard deal gets approval, something that should happen is the company will own IPs like Call of Duty, and Diablo. Sony plans to make some purchases in 2022, but perhaps, they won’t be comparable to what MS is doing.
More acquisitions to join the PlayStation Studios?
Sony certainly made some acquisitions in the past year. The brand bought studios like Bungie which is behind the successful Destiny series. The PlayStation firm also bought Housemarque its team and the studio behind the PS5’s Returnal. Now, a new report indicates that Sony has more acquisitions to do.
Back in 2021, Sony revealed that it was setting about $18.4 billion for key investments in the entertainment industry. During a recent Q&A session at Morgan Stanley’s conference, Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki provided new details. 2 years into this program, Sony spent about 1.3 trillion yen, leaving about 700 billion (Or $5.1 billion) for further investments. Considering this, the company plans to make further investments – read acquisitions – in the next months. Worth noting, that these acquisitions won’t be limited to that amount. Sony can allocate more resources at any time.
“We spent almost 1.3 trillion yen by the end of the last year. We have another year more. We would like to create more than 3 trillion yen cash flow in three years’ time. Next year is the last year in our current mid-range plan. We’re going to allocate operating cash flow to strategic investment and capital expenditure, as well as share buy-back.”
So you might be wondering, what PlayStation plans to buy in 2023-2024. Calm down, my question is wrong. In fact, it’s Sony that has an investment plan. Although it would be great to see more investments in gaming, we don’t know whether Sony will focus this amount on the PlayStation division. Although it is a core division right now, Sony is more than just the PlayStation. Anyway, if we are up to making bets, it would be good to see Sony spending that amount of Square-Enix.
Square-Enix is in the rumor mill, will Sony buy it?
Square-Enix has many IPs that made history on the PlayStation. So it would be really interesting to see this joining the PS house of ideas. There are many speculations in this regard. Seeing recent games like Final Fantasy VII Remake, and the upcoming Final Fantasy XVI being exclusive to PlayStation just add more heat to the rumors. Worth noting that the upcoming FFXVI had the direct involvement of Sony which helped the Square-Enix dev team to improve the game for the PS5. These certainly will add more heat to the rumors.
We will be eagerly waiting to see if Sony will make any purchase that equals what Microsoft is doing for the Xbox division. MS has infinite money, but like Phil Spencer would say, at least for now, “PlayStation makes better games”.
