‘Armored Core’ was one of FromSoftware’s biggest gaming franchises before the ‘Souls’ series.
In rather tedious news, Tencent and Sony Interactive Entertainment have acquired partial stakes in FromSoftware.
More specifically, Tencent has 16.25% of shares and Sony Interactive Entertainment has 14.09% of shares in FromSoftware.
The reason why this is boring is that Kadokawa is still the main owner (with 69.66% of the shares) and these new share acquisitions are both non-controlling stakes. In short, nothing has changed and neither Tencent nor Sony have any real decision-making power here.
So if you were thinking that Sony would be able to force platform exclusivity for all future FromSoftware titles, then you would be wrong. This will just be business as usual, except that FromSoftware may have some more capital to play around with.
One potentially interesting point here is that the money accrued from this will help FromSoftware bolster its publishing plans for the future.
This is noteworthy because FromSoftware actually publishes its own games in Japan, so moving that to be more of a global endeavor would be better for all concerned.
In that, in the past many of FromSoftware’s games were released internationally by publishers that neither cared nor understood their games. The results were that FromSoftware’s games were given no real international PR or marketing, and the localizations of these games were often thoroughly terrible as well.
This means that if FromSoftware can handle more of its international publishing, then these mistakes of the past can hopefully be avoided.
In the meantime, this share acquisition by Tencent and Sony is mostly about big tech companies hedging their bets and won’t have any real impact on gamers.
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