Last month, Sony appeared interested in acquiring Kadokawa, the parent company of Elden Ring developer FromSoftware. The companies have settled for the PlayStation-maker to become the largest stakeholder instead.
According to a press release Friday, Kadokawa, and Sony signed an agreement for Sony to invest 50 billion yen in the company, approximately $317 million. This means Sony is the company’s largest single shareholder, with a 10% stake.
The statement says the two companies will discuss future collaborations, including live-action movies, TV and anime shows based on the Kadokawa properties and expanding publishing of the company’s games. Sony reportedly was only interested in acquiring FromSoftware assets, but Kadokawa would only sell the entire company, worth more than $4 billion, according to a report from IGN Friday.
Sony and FromSoftware have had a unique relationship for quite some time, since the first PlayStation console. At that time, the developer made the King’s Field and Armored Core games, which were only available on PlayStation. The relationship continued during the PlayStation 2 era but changed significantly with the release of Demon’s Souls for the PS3 in 2009.
Sony reportedly wanted its own exclusive action RPG title to go against the popular Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. What resulted was the birth of the soulslike genre that continued with the Dark Souls series and reached its peak with the 2022 blockbuster Elden Ring. While FromSoftware has had a publisher partnership with Bandai Namco for most of its games, the developer and Sony did team up in 2015 for the PS4 exclusive, Bloodborne.
FromSoftware is not Kadokawa’s only game publisher. The company also owns Spike Chunsoft (maker of the Danganronpa series), Acquire (Octopath Traveler) and Gotcha Gotcha Games (RPG Maker and Pixel Game Maker). The company also owns a wide range of Japanese media covering film, books, magazines and anime.
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