After Selling Multiple Studios, Square Enix Wants to Build New Studios and Acquire More - Golden News Nordic

Square Enix is looking to build and acquire new studios despite selling several last week.

Part of the publisher’s medium-term business strategy, as revealed in its latest financial earnings report, is to “boost game development capabilities through establishing new studios, mergers and acquisitions, etc.”

Square Enix sold Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montréal, and Square Enix Montréal to Embracer Group for $300 million last week in a deal that included several IPs, including Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Thief, and more.

Although it seems unusual for Square Enix to ditch a number of studios and IPs and immediately look for others, it defines a goal in its report as “reshaping [its] digital entertainment portfolio”.

It is under this goal that Square Enix plans to establish and acquire more studios, along with the more general desire to “cultivate robust IP (including [the] create new IP)”.

Buying game developers outright has certainly been a popular strategy in the video game industry of late, with Microsoft leading an acquisition race spearheaded by its colossal $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard.

Every Square Enix game in development

Both Xbox and PlayStation are hiring directors to lead their acquisition strategies and it seems Square Enix wants to go down a similar route.

Sony bought Bungie in February for $3.6 billion and in the last year has also acquired several other studios, including Bluepoint and Housemarque. He has no intention of slowing down, as Sony Interactive Entertainment president Jim Ryan said in early April that he already has more purchases planned.

Xbox’s purchase of Activision Blizzard, on the other hand, will be one of the largest in entertainment history when the deal goes through, putting it on par with Disney’s purchase of 21st Century Fox for $ 71.3 billion and just shy of AT&T’s $85.4 billion purchase of Time Warner.

Ryan Dinsdale is a freelancer at Golden News who occasionally remembers tweeting @thelastdinsdale. He will talk about The Witcher all day.