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.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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