Sony’s Potential Kadokawa Acquisition Could Tighten Its Grip on Anime and Manga

While Microsoft has become the main character of acquisitions in corporate culture with its $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard, a new report suggests Sony is gearing up for a big buyout that will propel it even further to the top of the totem pole of monopolizing the anime industry.

According to Reuters, the PlayStation maker has set its sights on acquiring Kadokawa, a huge Japanese media company most famous in the gaming zeitgeist as the company behind Elden Ring. While a figure has yet to be revealed for the purchase, Reuters reports that—if talks go through—a deal could be inked within the coming weeks. While Sony making a big money play for a company behind one of gaming’s biggest sellers is an unsurprising domino effect to competitor Microsoft buying its way to perceived success with Activision Blizzard, it also deepens its foothold into the anime industry.

Before the news of Sony’s acquisition aims with Kadokawa, Sony made waves when it furthered its mission to be “the ultimate destination for anime fans” when it finalized its merger of Crunchyroll and Funimation in February. The merger caused Funimation, a longtime staple in the anime industry, to end its services in April. Although the merger bolstered fans accessing more than 1,600 hours of anime on the streamer, it also controversially led to digital copies of anime shows and movies on Funimation becoming inaccessible to users who merged their accounts on Crunchyroll.

As Reuters notes, Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida made the company’s plans exceedingly clear last year. The company’s goal was to invest in sustainable growth. It plans to do so through the following: “Lovable characters and intellectual property (IP) can live for 30, 50, or 100 years.”

As Gizmodo reports, Kadokawa owns a substantial share of the anime industry, with titles like Delicious in Dungeon, Re: Zero, Oshi no Ko, and Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation under its corporate umbrella. It should go without saying that one company owning a major anime streaming service that recently Pac-Man’d its rival, all of said streamer’s storefronts (which also acquired its respective competitor), and having ownership of a media company that deals with manga and anime distribution of big marquee shows does not follow the age-old saying that competition is good for business.

While some gamers are tentatively celebrating the merger, hoping it will somehow lead to the company making a remaster of Bloodborne, Sony will also have even more influence in the anime industry. Key among them are the production and distribution of shows and manga, which would extend to English publishers like Yen Press. Big mergers like Microsoft’s with Activision Blizzard also came with massive layoffs due to redundancies of roles and a general need to conflate profit margins to stave away post-acquisition clarity. So don’t hold your breath on history repeating itself once more on that front.

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