 Hey everyone, welcome to Nintendo Prime and I am so flabbergasted at the moment. The story that broke late yesterday is one that I think Nintendo is going to be concerned about, especially when you consider some of the things we have gotten from the partnership between these two companies, but also maybe not so surprising when you consider what the hell Sony has been doing with this company of lately and the company we're talking about is Square Enix and it looks like Sony is attempting to buy Square Enix and that Square Enix has been making moves over the last year to acquiesce to Sony and what exactly Sony wants to purchase from them. This is deeply concerning of course for Nintendo fans because we've been getting really big support from Square Enix. Think about some of the games we have gotten from Octopath Traveler to Triangle Strategy, Final Fantasy, Crystal Chronicles Remastered, oh and by the way, Live Alive. That's right, we just got a game last week from this partnership so to consider that Sony might be swooping in and buying up Square Enix is obviously something that we need to be paying attention to. The whole industry really needs to be paying attention to now. How do we know about this in the first place? Well, before we get into it, I would appreciate if you would drop a like on this channel, subscribe and hey, editor, roll that intro baby! Alright, so as you can see over here on GameRant, although you could pick whatever website you want, this news is everywhere and it says a rumor, Sony is interested in acquiring Square Enix, the Eidos Montreal founder. Hence, Sony may be looking to swoop in and purchase Square Enix or at least one of its developers. The last few years I've seen Microsoft and Sony take major steps in expanding their respective rosters of in-house developers with Microsoft making ways with the acquisition of Bethesda and Activision Blizzard. Sony has not been as aggressive given the roster of studios already under its umbrella such as Sucker Punch and Insomniac, surprised they didn't mention Naughty Dog, but hasn't been shy about adding to it either as with the recent purchase of Bungie shows. Sony may not be done as the founder of Eidos Montreal, which was owned by Square Enix, indicates Sony may have its eyes on Square Enix or at least one of its central studios in Japan. Eidos Montreal founder Stephanie Dostos touched upon this possibility during an interview with GameIndustry.biz where he spoke on the possibility of a Sony purchase, along with the general state of Square Enix and recent sales of Eidos Montreal. He said the sales of Eidos Montreal, Square Enix Montreal, and Crystal Dynamics to Swedish company Embracer Group was due, in part, to mounting pressure from Japan on its foreign developers to produce better results commercially. He described the situation as a train that is slowing down and in need of a fresh injection of cash. Regarding Sony, Dostos said that he is aware of rumors that it was interested in bringing Square Enix into the fold in wake of Square selling three of its biggest Western developers to Embracer Group. However, Dostos says the caveat to this is Sony may only be interested in acquiring Square Enix Tokyo studio rather than the larger company. I heard rumors that Sony said they are really interested in Square Enix Tokyo, but not the rest. GameIndustry then, so I think Square Enix CEO Yasuki Matsuda-san put it like a garage sale. When players take a look at the list of titles Square Enix Tokyo team has worked on, it becomes clear why Sony would have interest in trying to purchase this studio. The team's most notable credits include multiple entries in the Kingdom Hearts series, namely the Mainline 3 series games of Kingdom Hearts 1, 2, and 3. However, it's not known if they are the ones working on Kingdom Hearts 4. That said, the team's pedigree would fit right in with Sony's roster, which is regarded among critics and players as delivering some of the best AAA single player titles in recent memory. The one point working against the Tokyo team though is they have shared the development load with multiple teams rather than heading up a major game studio on their own, so they don't just develop them solo, they involve other studios at Square. It then begs the question of if acquired would the Tokyo team be expanded to lead a major titles development or continue to bring in support team for games such as God of War Ragnarok or Marvel Spider-Man 2 etc etc etc. Now there's not a whole lot of clarification from this and naturally this person has heard these rumors from inside the company. So these rumors aren't just coming from some random people on Twitter, this is coming from somebody who founded the company and heard these rumblings while working there and being inside of all of this. So this is obviously rather interesting. Tokyo team makes a little bit of sense, they could try to maybe get some exclusivity with Kingdom Hearts if they can get the Kingdom Hearts IP included with that acquisition. I also think that it is something for Sony to say consider buying the whole of Square Enix in Japan because think about this, think about this. Sony keeps paying for exclusivity on what big IP? Final Fantasy which is another massive Square Enix IP and literally Final Fantasy 16 is only going to be available on PlayStation 5. I mean they might allow it to be released later on PC but it won't be on Xbox, it won't be on a next gen Switch. It's only going to be coming to PlayStation 5 because Sony is writing fat checks and maybe Sony is tired of writing fat checks and instead would just like to buy the company on the whole. Now Nintendo has previously spoke that they wouldn't really get involved in all these acquisition talks unless one of their major partners was about to be acquired then Nintendo would step in and obviously try to make their own bid and make their own noise. Now does Nintendo have enough money to even purchase Square Enix? Well if we actually look at what Square Enix is worth today, you'll see the Square Enix has a market cap of 5.45 billion. This means it would cost about 5.5 billion dollars to buy Square Enix as it sits today. Now Nintendo does have actually 10 billion, I think a little bit north of 10 billion dollars sitting in a bank so Nintendo could literally outright buy Square Enix should Square Enix and their major shareholders be willing to sell it to Nintendo. So absolutely Nintendo does have the money to make such an acquisition. Now this would obviously be a major flip turn of events and bring a lot of Final Fantasy and all that stuff over to Nintendo's side of the spectrum. Now this assumes Nintendo would even get involved in this. Sony on the other hand absolutely could afford to make this purchase. They are technically a bigger overall company. However Sony doesn't necessarily have the cash on hand because like most major companies they actually live in a world of debt and they're always repaying that debt so they would just go further in debt to make this purchase. It wouldn't really be that big a deal. Now somebody would go why wouldn't Microsoft get involved in these acquisition talks because hey look what they spent on Activision Blizzard why wouldn't they just chalk up another 5.5 billion. Well one they're still waiting for Activision Blizzard to fully be approved and go through and two it's much harder for a American based company to purchase a Japanese company due to Japanese law. It'll be much easier for Sony or Nintendo to make this acquisition should Square Enix actually want to be purchased. Now it's not sure if Square Enix is looking to sell off different studios you know like Banda Namco I think they're the ones that had Monolithsoft and they sold them off to Nintendo. We're not so sure that they're you know going to just sell one. Obviously Sony still pays a lot of money for Final Fantasy. I could see Sony looking at this as 5.5 billion is a worthwhile investment for them to boost the PlayStation brand. This would naturally also hurt competitors. You're not going to see Square Enix games on Xbox which we don't see a ton of them on Xbox anyways but you definitely will start seeing them cut off on Nintendo and a lot of these Square Enix games these Octopath Travelers the Live Alive this kind of stuff sells really big numbers in Japan on Switch so this would actually hurt Nintendo and boost Sony in their home country. So this could end up being an absolutely banger acquisition for Sony and obviously for us Nintendo fans really really suck. But again the market cap is at a point that Sony or Nintendo could make this acquisition. It's not out of the question and as Shantara Furukawa said in the past if a major partner company of theirs which we presume Live Alive and Octopath Traveler and Triangle Strategy that they would consider this to be one of their major partners that Nintendo would get involved in some way and maybe how Nintendo gets involved is they buy the studio that's making those games bring that studio onto Nintendo and let Sony buy out the rest of the studios that there is possible that there could be a split like that so maybe Sony doesn't try to buy the whole of Square Enix they buy the major ones and then Nintendo comes in and buys the other teams that they want suddenly Triangle Strategy Octopath Traveler and games like that in the future become exclusive and Nintendo you know they basically become first party IPs at that point so we'll have to see we don't obviously know what's going to happen here it's just a rumor but this isn't your typical rumor this is coming from somebody who actually worked at the company and heard this information from inside those hollowed halls so what are your guys's thoughts on this would you be excited for Sony to buy it up remember Sony already pays a ton of money to get Final Fantasy 7 remake and the rest all exclusive Final Fantasy 16 so we're already seeing where Sony's chucking hundreds of millions of dollars to make these things exclusive to their platforms already obviously Kingdom Hearts you know we just got it on switch but it's not here natively so it really doesn't feel like we have that full support obviously anytime we talk about an acquisition of a beloved multi-platform company there's going to be opinions going in all directions Sony fans being stupidly excited Nintendo fans probably being worried Microsoft fans going I don't really get the games anyway so I don't know what to think about this so yeah it's going to be rather interested to see how this goes to me this is really a Nintendo versus Sony thing when it comes to Square Enix because Square Enix is such a massive partner with both companies in different ways and Square is benefiting from being a partner with both these companies however hey a straight up buyout a straight up buyout that's cash that's that that makes investors happy they can walk away a billions of dollars and Sony gets to walk away with a ready made team of developers so it also is interesting because it does note later in that interview that apparently Sony was not interested in any of the western studios that that Square owned and Square in the last years now sold off every single western studio they have seems like they might be preparing to be acquired there so thank you guys so much for tuning in let me know your thoughts on this down in the comments below and I'll catch you in the next video