Someone tell me how I'm supposed to feel about Sony confirming their intent to buy KADOKAWA. I'm too tired to form my own opinions today
@neatchee
Kadokawa owns Spike Chunsoft, which develops Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. Sony will never let them make a new entry in that series again if the sale goes through, due to how much the two companies despise each other.
@neatchee Generally an anti-competitive move, with a few specific fears. One of them is for ANN, which is owned by Kadokawa, and sometimes prints unfavorable news/reviews about properties owned/promoted by Sony. I'm not afraid it will be turned into a PR machine (they won't abide by that), I'm afraid Sony will simply shut it down and we'll lose a huge resource. Aside from current events, ANN is a massive archive of news and reviews, and by far the most comprehensive English-language encyclopedia of manga & anime production.
@neatchee Go look at who owns both companies (the Japanese ones).
I don’t think there’s much to feel to be honest, it’s a classic rich getting richer move that the government (in this case in Japan) should stop but aren’t. Consolidation is great for shareholders, not for anyone else.
As far as products I suspect we’ll see a streamlining around anime/manga and mostly business as usual with games.
I could be wrong, but if Sony Games (not the real name, I forgot it:)) had bought From Software it would have been different. But this feels like a big corporate move to fire a bunch of people and create share holder value. MegaCorp basically.
So I expect games to be released for other platforms and a possible future reorg that moves who the studios report to (reorgs are always guaranteed).
Probably better than if MS had bought them.