Sony said it wants to spend at least $5.1 billion on acquisitions of other companies and stock purchases by the end of this year.
Everyone is excited about Microsoft’s attempts to acquire Activision Blizzard, but the Redmond giant isn’t the only console maker currently focused on buying studios. Sony also has considerable ambitions in this regard, having just revealed some details about its plans for this year.
- By 2023, Sony wants to spend at least $5.1 billion on acquisitions and partial investments in various businesses..
- In 2021, the company created a special fund of $18.4 billion for this purpose. Since then, the Japanese company has acquired, among others, Bungie, Housemarque, Nixxes, Bluepoint Games, Firesprite, Savage Game Studios, Haven Studios and Valkyrie Entertainment.
- Sony also increased its stake in Devolver Digital, FromSoftware and Epic Games.
- Of the $18.4 billion in the fund, there’s about $5.1 billion left that the company wants to spend this year. However, Sony stresses that the amount will be increased if necessary.
It should be added that the entire fund is not limited to games and is also intended for the acquisition of companies in other sectors (for example, the conglomerate acquired the anime streaming service Crunchyroll). At the moment, however, Sony’s main focus is on buying developers, so the lion’s share of $5.1 billion will likely be used for that purpose.
It is difficult to assess which companies could be candidates for acquisition by Sony. 5.1 billion is too small an amount to buy a major publisher, so we expect the Japanese conglomerate to continue buying development studios. Some suggest, however, that a good candidate would be Square Enix, whose market value is estimated at just $5 billion.
A while ago, there were rumors that Sony might try to take over Take-Two Interactive. However, they had a very unreliable source. The generally very knowledgeable journalist Jason screams casts doubt on the veracity of these reports, and new information on how much Sony wants to spend this year also makes these rumors false.
- Sony – official website