Stephane D’Astous, founder of Eidos Montreal, revealed in an interview that Sony intends to acquire Square Enix’s head office in Tokyo, in order to acquire assets such as “Final Fantasy” and “Kingdom Hearts”.
However, Sony is obviously not interested in Square Enix holding game studios outside of Japan, so in May this year, it sold game studios such as Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montreal, and Square Enix Montreal to Embracer for $300 million, which seems to be related to this deal. Transaction related, possibly as a pre-process before preparing for sale.
Earlier, the market also reported that Square Enix would prepare to sell its own assets after the transaction with Embracer, but Sony and Square Enix all responded to this.
In the past, Sony and Square Enix have maintained an in-depth cooperation relationship, including the “Final Fantasy VII” that has been on the PlayStation platform since the end of January 1997, and the “Final Fantasy VII Remake” series, which is currently exclusively released on the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 platforms. Launched in January next year, “Curse Land” is currently only released exclusively on the PlayStation 5 platform, and is not planned to be launched on the Xbox platform.
If Sony decides to acquire Square Enix, plus game studios such as Bungie that it has recently decided to acquire, it is expected to be able to further compete with Microsoft, which acquired Activision Blizzard and ZeniMax Media.