Bloomberg has reported today that there is interest from several buyers to acquire Square Enix. However, this report is not based on any announcement by SQUARE ENIX HOLDINGS CO., LTD. We do not consider selling off the company or any part of its businesses, nor have we received any offer from any third party to acquire the company or any part of its businesses.
Pretty much snuffs that rumor.
Square Enix is an almost 2 billion dollar a year revenue company so it would be a rather big buyout if somebody did want to buy them.
It’s fun to imagine things that could never possibly ever happen. And I imagine the first thing Square would do is get Yoshi P to drop a meteor on Azeroth, shut down the servers, then reboot the game, just like he did with FF14.
And I bet he’d do it, too. I bet he’d double his workload by rebooting WoW while still managing FF14. The dude is a workaholic and expressed his love of WoW. He’d totally do it.
There won’t be any acquisitions, but Yoshida already wants to do a WoW crossover.
Will it happen? No. With the duration of 9.0(.5), it looks like Blizzard is already playing catch up. Development resources for a crossover event just aren’t there. Even if they were, I doubt daddy Activision would allow it.
In all seriousness, this wouldnt ever be a good move – just looking at FF14 instead of the entire conglomerate. FF14 has a different goal design and gameplay design than WoW is familiar with.
FF14 is a more casual-friendly console-based MMO. FF14 focuses more on the journey and story rather than the end-game battle content.
I really dislike the monopolies sort of thing since it’s not really a great thing for customers to experience. Competing businesses is good because businesses have to offer the best deals and have to earn our money.
Wait, how’s a popular and long time video game developer and console maker (Nintendo), a popular film/video studio with a console (Sony) and a massive tech company (Microsoft) is close behind those 3 companies?
I’m not trying to sound snarky here, i find it a little odd to think that a video game corporation that just makes video games is way more ahead then something like Microsoft ,Nintendo or Sony. You mean that EA, AB and Squenix makes more money then those 3 console makers? Or maybe i’m misinterpreting it and you mean to say that the console makers can buy EA, AB and Squenix?..
(I’m really not sure how profitable arcade games have been the last decades or so to be comparable to the Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony, so i left out Capcom.)
It gets a bit funky, but it is based upon production numbers. For example, EA directly produces and develops Madden which sell say 10 million copies (wild number here). Where as Sony produces games through second parties, ie Guerrilla Games, and does not get full credit the 5 million copies of Horizon Zero Dawn. I want to say it would be a 50/50 share, but I don’t think that is always the case.
It’s pretty hard to explain, but that is kind of a broad example of how they get rated. Now that changes every single year. Where Square-Enix has a bunch of direct production games (ie Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest), their second party companies like Crystal Dynamics cause them to lose ranking at times. Yet, sometimes those second party companies get counted when they try to rank. Third party companies… never get credit. Nope, not a single time for this horrible example.
It is just a way that someone figured out how to rank them without the issues for companies that make titles for or release on multiple sources. I also could be completely wrong, which I’d love some correction on this with.
Blizzard was never a producer of titles. They only developed them, while Activision did a bunch of their producing and distribution. Distribution is almost an outdated term, but is still part of a producing company or the ones funding the games.
Doubtful. The video game market is too fragmented to get much interest from the antitrust folks in the U.S. EA could buy ActiBlizz and they probably wouldn’t care.
But if Tencent did, maybe they would take an interest because of the geopolitical angle.
