PlayStation Boss Confirms More Acquisitions Are on the Way

Alessio Palumbo

Wccftech


PlayStation Boss Confirms More Acquisitions Are on the Way

This week, PlayStation president and CEO Jim Ryan announced the much anticipated PS Plus revamp. This June, the new subscription service will launch with three tiers, even though it won't feature day-one releases of its exclusives, unlike Microsoft's rival service Game Pass.

As part of a fresh interview with the Official PlayStation Podcast (Episode 427 - The Wonderlands Between), Ryan also touched upon another very hot topic - acquisitions. A couple of weeks ago, Sony announced a deal to acquire Haven Studios, the Montréal-based development team founded by Jade Raymond. The news came on the heels of the five acquisitions made by PlayStation in 2021 (Housemarque, Nixxes Software, Firesprite, Bluepoint Games, and Valkyrie Entertainment) and, of course, the massive $3.6 billion deal with Bungie.

According to Ryan, that's far from the end of this spree.

The critical success and the commercial success of the first-party games that we've been making has given us permission to invest heavily into content creation. We're growing our studios organically and we're growing through acquisition. We acquired five studios during the course of 2021. We're in discussions with Bungie. And we have more plans.

Of course, such a statement from the head of PlayStation inevitably sparked speculation among fans. Indeed, there is the possibility of Sony looking to buy other partner studios such as Deviation Studios or Firewalk Studios, which are both working on triple-A multiplayer live service games like Haven.

But the latest rumors actually point to something much bigger on the way from PlayStation. On the Kinda Funny Games podcast, host Greg Miller and GamesBeat's Jeff Grubb said they've heard a new acquisition is coming and will be a big one.

With Sony having roughly $10 billion cash left for acquisition deals this year, we could be looking at a major Japanese publisher like CAPCOM (market cap of $5.273 billion), Square Enix (market cap of $5.553 billion), SEGA (market cap of $4.027 billion), and KONAMI (market cap of $8.459 billion). Either way, it sounds like we'll learn of this upcoming deal fairly soon, so stay tuned.

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