Sony has revealed their response to Microsoft’s recently closed acquisition of Activision Blizzard King.
Eric Lempel, PlayStation’s head of business operations, was up front about their position in an interview with CNBC. He said that his company continues to look for new developer partners. Those partnerships do not always mean that they will be acquiring said companies.
These are Lempel’s direct quotes:
“We have a number of ways of looking at this. In terms of great content, that’s where we’re focused.
We’ve done more M&A [mergers and acquisitions] in the past decade than we’ve ever done.
We’re always looking to work with new partners, whether that’s somebody as an external provider … or working with a developer along with the way and then acquiring them later.”
Lempel than gives Insomniac Games as an example, the producers of the Marvel’s Spider-Man games. This was a studio that they started out by partnering with independently, but later chose to acquire.
Sony has historically done very well by partnering with third party companies. It was these partnerships that got them plum deals for major franchises such as Resident Evil, Grand Theft Auto, Tekken, and of course, Final Fantasy. Many of those partnered franchises made them the market leader and an indelible part of the industry.
On the other hand, the company has had a messier history with acquisitions. There was a notorious period in the 2010s were they closed studios they had acquired in the 2000s, including Bigbig Studios, Evolution Studios, and David Scott Jaffee’s Incognito Entertainment.
While closing studios or selling them off after failed ventures is nothing new in the industry, this was particularly damning. It had seemed that Sony acquired these studios, just to shut them down, without care for the game developers working under them.
Another dimension to this, of course, is that it was the effectivity of those third party partnerships that throttled Xbox, because Sony had successfully convinced too many companies to skip their competitor’s console. In other words, it was these partnerships that prodded Microsoft to look into acquisitions of Zenimax / Bethesda and Activision Blizzard King. In fact, it did come to light in regulatory investigations that Starfield was almost a PlayStation exclusive, until Microsoft received word and moved to buy the company to secure Starfield for themselves.
So some gamers may have been cheering for Sony to go on some revenge acquisition sprees, but they definitely will not need to do that to compete. Those developer partnerships have been historically successful, and they continue to maintain those strong relationships with third party companies today.
While many industry observers expect further acquisitions, it is just as like that we are now at where the industry is going to be for the next decade. And now we wait and see if Microsoft’s gambit will pay off against Sony.
