As explained in a press release published this morning by Kadokawa Corporation, FromSoftware has issued new shares of its capital in favor of Sixjoy Hong Kong, one of the many subsidiaries of Tencent, and Sony Interactive Entertainment, which already knows the studio well for having worked with him on Demon’s Souls, Bloodborne and Déraciné.
Tencent/Sixjoy Hong Kong now owns 16.25% of FromSoftware shares while Sony Interactive Entertainment grabs 14.09% of the studio. Even if it recently separated from its internal team dedicated to video games and the licenses that go with them (we now find them at Dragami Games), Kadokawa Corporation wants to continue to develop its video game activity and therefore remains the main shareholder. of FromSoftware with 69.66% of the shares.
As a reminder, Tencent and Sony had already established relations with Kadokawa Corporation last year in the form of a strategic alliance in the fields of animation and video games. This proximity means that Tencent and Sony were best placed to participate in the development of FromSoftware.
Because the purpose of all this is nothing other than to strengthen the means allocated to Hidetaka Miyazaki’s studio, already very prominent since Demon’s Souls, which we had no idea would give birth to a real genre in 2009 , but whose dimension changed again with the colossal success of Elden Ring (16.6 million in sales). With this new issue worth 36.4 billion yen (262.5 million euros), the valuation of the studio founded in 1986 is also around 885 million euros.
Note that the loser in the long-term story could be Bandai Namco, as Kadokawa Corporation’s stated goal is for FromSoftware to become its own publisher, not just in Japan as is already the case today. , but also in the rest of the world. In other words, Kadokawa Corporation dreams that the receipts of the next cartons of FromSoftware land directly in its pocket instead of sharing with an intermediary (Bandai Namco in the case of Elden Ring or Activision in that of Sekiro).
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