WB Games may have an unexpected buyer waiting in the wings. As reported by SEScoops, Sony is interested in buying WB Games, but as part of a bigger transaction.
Warner Bros Discovery itself is in the middle of a company restructuring. When they finish this process in 2026, they will be splitting into two companies. One will be WBD Global Networks, which will hold their cable channels including CNN, TNT, and TBS. The other, WBD Streaming & Services, encompasses all their other businesses, including WB Games.
SEScoops claims that Sony has been interested in acquiring Warner Bros Discovery for some time now. However, they didn’t want to get saddled with the company’s cable and TV business, which is currently swimming in $ 37 billion in debt.
When Warner Bros Discovery’s split ends, WBD Streaming & Services will be headed by David Zaslav. While it hasn’t been confirmed, it’s certainly possible Zaslav has set these things in motion for the purpose of selling to Sony and leaving the entertainment industry altogether. But then again, it will also be entirely possible that Zaslav wants Sony to buy his company and include him in the package.
WB Games under JB Perrette has itself undergone an internal restructuring of its own. Perrette has promoted several of the people who are running their game studios as senior vice presidents answerable directly to him. In essence, the people who made games for WB are now also helping run operations.
If this deal goes through as planned, Sony will be facing monopoly and competition concerns of its own. That will be mainly for the bigger picture of merging Sony’s entertainment business with WBD. Sony’s Columbia Pictures and Warner Bros are two of the original Big Five studios of Hollywood, and remain power brokers in film and show production today. While WB Games wouldn’t be anywhere close to the scale of Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, it would still warrant regulation investigation for potential monopoly and competition concerns of its own.
But we suspect a group of gamers would be excited at the prospect of Sony supposedly acquiring a group of exclusives in WB Games for PlayStation. If this deal goes through, it would actually be in Sony’s best interests to keep WB Games’ products multiplatform, lest they once again enter situations where their large scale AAAs fail to make enough money.
The real concern here is that both PlayStation and WB Games management have made huge missteps in the last three years, leading to layoffs and studio closures for both companies. Would this really be in both Sony’s and WB Games’ best interests? Do fans want Sony to be known as the company that puts the finisher on Mortal Kombat?
In any case, this is still a rumor for now, one that Zaslav and WB themselves may not be eager to make a reality. We’ll see if Sony or WBD comments on this one. It certainly seems that WB Games, and WBD in general, doesn’t really need a huge capital infusion, as much as it just needs better leadership to make it a huge success on its own merits once again.
