Everyone is talking about the gaming angle, and yes, Sony buying FromSoft would be big in the game space. But Sony owning all of Kadokawa productions, with Crunchyroll as their distribution engine...
Everyone is talking about the gaming angle, and yes, Sony buying FromSoft would be big in the game space. But Sony owning all of Kadokawa productions, with Crunchyroll as their distribution engine gives them a massive, MASSIVE share of the international anime distribution market.
To expand on the scope of this, because I was also surprised that more people weren't talking about the breadth of what would happen if this deal went through: Kadokawa has revenues of more than...
To expand on the scope of this, because I was also surprised that more people weren't talking about the breadth of what would happen if this deal went through:
Kadokawa has revenues of more than half that of Sega Sammy (the whole thing, not just the video game portion) and a similar fraction of its total asset value. So it's kinda like if Sony bought a good chunk of Sega Sammy. Kadokawa has about half the claimed asset value as Nippon TV (national TV stations, Studio Ghibli, etc) and 6x that of Sanrio (Hello Kitty, among other things). Kadokawa has approximately the same total assets (IPs and things) as Bandai Namco Holdings (the whole thing) but about a third of Bamco's operating income. Kadokawa is a very large conglomerate and already have substantial investment from Tencent and an agreement to help distribute content via Tencent's properties in China.
Sony already owns Funimation and Crunchyroll, so this is tying together IP with streaming services with more streaming markets and more IP. It's really huge.
On the gaming front, I don't think a lot of that will resonate much with many people outside of the obvious, which is why FromSoft is front and center in the headlines. A lot of people haven't heard of Kadokawa properties outside of stuff they own via subsidiaries like Spike Chunsoft or Enterbrain (which I believe still owns RPG Maker). I'm not sure how the IPs under Acquire work, because they were just acquired by Kadokawa earlier in 2024. And for instance Octopath Traveler was jointly developed and published by SE. I would bet that IP has contract negotiation issues if the Sony buyout is successful.
Everyone is talking about the gaming angle, and yes, Sony buying FromSoft would be big in the game space. But Sony owning all of Kadokawa productions, with Crunchyroll as their distribution engine gives them a massive, MASSIVE share of the international anime distribution market.
I have to wonder how this would affect distribution deals with services like Netflix and Amazon Prime.
To expand on the scope of this, because I was also surprised that more people weren't talking about the breadth of what would happen if this deal went through:
Kadokawa has revenues of more than half that of Sega Sammy (the whole thing, not just the video game portion) and a similar fraction of its total asset value. So it's kinda like if Sony bought a good chunk of Sega Sammy. Kadokawa has about half the claimed asset value as Nippon TV (national TV stations, Studio Ghibli, etc) and 6x that of Sanrio (Hello Kitty, among other things). Kadokawa has approximately the same total assets (IPs and things) as Bandai Namco Holdings (the whole thing) but about a third of Bamco's operating income. Kadokawa is a very large conglomerate and already have substantial investment from Tencent and an agreement to help distribute content via Tencent's properties in China.
Sony already owns Funimation and Crunchyroll, so this is tying together IP with streaming services with more streaming markets and more IP. It's really huge.
On the gaming front, I don't think a lot of that will resonate much with many people outside of the obvious, which is why FromSoft is front and center in the headlines. A lot of people haven't heard of Kadokawa properties outside of stuff they own via subsidiaries like Spike Chunsoft or Enterbrain (which I believe still owns RPG Maker). I'm not sure how the IPs under Acquire work, because they were just acquired by Kadokawa earlier in 2024. And for instance Octopath Traveler was jointly developed and published by SE. I would bet that IP has contract negotiation issues if the Sony buyout is successful.