There is currently a takeover bid from activist investors in Kadokawa, parent company of Ancient Ring And Dark souls The manufacturer FromSoftware, and FromSoftware in particular, plays an important role in the investor narrative: they are tired of giving bags of money to Bandai Namco and want to see FromSoftware publish its own games.
This comes from a presentation given by Oasis Management, an activist investor that recently launched a bid to oust Kadokawa CEO Takeshi Natsuno on the grounds that he mismanaged the company. Oasis offers a number of reasons why he thinks this is true, but through a presentation given to investors last month, one of his main points is that under Natsuno’s leadership, FromSoftware is leaving huge sums of money on the table by letting Bandai Namco and others publish games like Ancient Ring.
The deck highlights the incredible success of Ancient Ringwhich was published by FromSoftware in Japan, but Bandai Namco overseas. According to the presentation, more than 90 percent of Ancient Ring sales were generated overseas and, as a result, Kadokawa “profited little” from the game’s global success. Oasis’ argument is that Kadokawa grew as a company, both in terms of staff and capabilities, and that the game’s move to increased digital distribution made self-publishing easier than ever. As Oasis points out, Kadokawa has been suggesting self-publishing since 2020 already, and self-published games were even part of Kadokawa’s own management plans at one point in 2023, before subsequently being removed from future decks.
“As part of a simplified scenario analysis, if FromSoftware were to produce another successful title comparable to Ancient Ring”, with sales exceeding 30 million units, the absence of self-publishing will once again result in substantial economic value being left to external publishing partners rather than Kadokawa shareholders,” Oasis writes.
It would certainly be a bit tricky for FromSoftware to self-publish everything even if it wanted to. While he is officially the owner of Ancient Ring registered trademark fully and could thus self-publish a Ancient Ring 2he does not have Dark Souls, the souls of demonsOr Transmitted by blood. Any future games in any of these franchises will need to be negotiated with Bandai Namco (in the first case) or Sony (in the second and third), who may be reluctant to give up publishing rights. But maybe that’s Oasis’s point: FromSoftware doesn’t exactly control what makes money, and that’s a major problem for the company’s future…or at least its shareholders’ wallets.
Here again, the next title from FromSoftware, Bloods of Twilightis fully owned by FromSoftware, including publishing rights. This could indicate that Natsuno is starting to move towards self-publishing anyway. After all, it takes time to develop a game. Ancient Ring was first revealed in 2019 with a deal already in place with Bandai Namco, a year before Oasis sent out their letter about self-publishing. FromSoftware couldn’t very well have walked away from its deal at this point, even if it had wanted to. Also, Natsuno wasn’t even CEO until 2021, well after these deals were signed. It may very well be that this is just hype for nothing on Oasis’ part. That’s the other thing to keep in mind here: Oasis cares about shareholder profit (especially its own) and not much else here. Oasis is also the same company which previously tried to get Nintendo to shift to free-to-play mobile games and charge players $0.99 to make Mario jump higher. Granted, that was over a decade ago, but that doesn’t exactly indicate a company has big ideas when it comes to video games.
Fans are more concerned that increased control of Oasis (which now has a 13.76% stake in the company, more than Sony) would lead to unwanted interference at FromSoftware itself. Denfaminico player in fact, he contacted director Hidetaka Miyazaki for feedback on the whole situation, and Miyazaki mostly seemed to want to stay out of it. As translated by IGN: “I’m not saying there isn’t room for improvement, but we can freely create the kind of games we want without undue interference.
“I think for me and for FromSoftware the most important thing going forward is to maintain this environment and focus on game development as much as possible.”
Whether or not this all turns out to be a problem for FromSoftware or the games it makes will apparently only become a problem on June 24, when the vote on whether or not to keep Natsuno will take place at Kadokawa’s shareholders’ meeting. Even then, a lot depends on who is actually appointed in his place, how much influence Oasis has over them, and how deeply Oasis wants to get its hands into FromSoftware’s affairs.