Sony and Tencent have increased their stakes in the shares of FromSoftware studio, developer of franchises such as Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Elden Ring and others.
Sony now owns 14.09 percent of the Japanese studio, while Tencent, through its subsidiary Sixjoy, now owns 16.25 percent.
In recent years, both Sony and Microsoft have expanded their domains in the video game industry by acquiring other studios and publishers to “bulk out” their catalogs of exclusives. While Microsoft has made bold moves by acquiring names like Bethesda and Activision Blizzard, Sony has also not “been down” by acquiring Bungie and this week, increased its stake at the helm of FromSoftware, one of the most renowned studios today.
Even with Sony and Tencent’s investment increases, Kadokawa Corporation still remains the studio’s majority shareholder, with 69.66 percent of the shares.
In the deal announcement, Kadokawa said that FromSoftware “will aim to proactively invest in developing more powerful game intellectual property to strengthen FromSoftware’s development capabilities and will seek to establish a framework that allows for expanding the scope of its own publication in the global market in significant growth”.
In addition to these purposes, in order to increase the number of users in the global market of game intellectual property that FromSoftware creates and develops, FromSoftware decided to carry out the Third Party Allocation for Sixjoy within the Tencent Group, which has strength in its capabilities to develop and deploy mobile games and other network technologies in the global market, including China, and SIE within the Sony Group, which has strength in its ability to deploy intellectual property in games, videos and various other media in the global market, simultaneously and separately.
The announcement is certainly full of corporate jargon, but what is understandable is that FromSoftware intends to use the power of its new investors, both in the mobile gaming market and in the console, PC, TV and film gaming divisions, to expand its intellectual properties.
It remains to be seen if with this, Sony also intends to revive some franchises like Bloodborne or if future FromSoftware games will be PlayStation exclusives.
So, what do you think of this news?
