There’s an activist investor takeover bid going on right now at Kadokawa, parent company of Elden Ring and Dark Souls maker FromSoftware, and FromSoftware specifically is playing a big role in the investors’ pitch: they’re sick of giving sacks 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 has recently begun a bid to oust Kadokawa CEO Takeshi Natsuno on the basis that he has allegedly mismanaged the company. Oasis offers a number of reasons it believes this to be true, but per a presentation given to investors last month, one of its major points is that under Natsuno’s leadership, FromSoftware is leaving huge amounts of money on the table by letting Bandai Namco and others publish games like Elden Ring.
The deck highlights the incredible success of Elden Ring, which was published by FromSoftware in Japan, but Bandai Namco overseas. According to the presentation, over 90 percent of Elden Ring sales were generated overseas, and as a result, Kadokawa “benefitted little” from the game’s global success. Oasis’ argument is that Kadokawa has grown as a company in both headcount and capabilities, and the shift in gaming to increased digital distribution has made it easier than ever to self-publish. As Oasis points out, it’s been suggesting self-publishing to Kadokawa since as far back as 2020, and self-publishing games had even been part of Kadokawa’s own management plans at one point back in 2023, before later being removed from future decks.
“Under a simplified scenario analysis, if FromSoftware were to produce another hit title comparable to Elden Ring, with sales exceeding 30 million units, the absence of self-publishing will once again result in substantial economic value being left with external publishing partners rather than Kadokawa shareholders,” Oasis writes.
It would admittedly be a little tricky for FromSoftware to self-publish everything even if it wanted to. While it officially owns the Elden Ring trademark fully and thus could self-publish an Elden Ring 2, it does not own Dark Souls, Demon’s Souls, or Bloodborne. Any future games in any of those franchises would need to be negotiated with Bandai Namco (in the first case) or Sony (in the second and third), who might be reluctant to give up publishing rights. Though, perhaps that’s Oasis’ point here—FromSoftware isn’t exactly in control of the things making it money, and that’s a major issue for the company’s future…or at least for the wallets of its shareholders.
Then again, FromSoftware’s next title, The Duskbloods, is fully owned by FromSoftware, including publishing rights. This might indicate that Natsuno is starting to move in a self-publishing direction anyway. It takes time to develop a game, after all. Elden Ring was first revealed in 2019 with a deal already in place with Bandai Namco, a year before Oasis sent its letter about self-publishing. FromSoftware couldn’t very well have dumped its deal at that stage even if it wanted to. Also, Natsuno wasn’t even CEO until 2021, well after these deals were signed. This very well may be just be a lot of ballyhoo over nothing from Oasis. Which is the other thing to keep in mind here: Oasis is concerned about shareholder profit (specifically its own) and not much else here. Oasis is also the same company that previously tried to get Nintendo to pivot to free-to-play mobile games and charge players $0.99 to get Mario to jump higher. Admittedly that was over a decade ago, but it’s not exactly indicative of a company with great ideas about video games.
There’s a wider concern from fans that increased control by Oasis (which now owns a 13.76-percent stake in the company, more than Sony) would result in unwanted interference at FromSoftware itself. Denfaminico Gamer actually reached out to director Hidetaka Miyazaki for comment on the whole situation, and Miyazaki mostly seemed to want to stay out of it all. As translated by IGN: “I’m not saying that there’s no room for improvement but we can freely make the kind of games we want to make without excessive interference.
“I think for both myself and for FromSoftware, the most important thing going forward is to maintain this environment and focus as much as possible on game development.”
Whether or not any of this turns out to be a problem for FromSoftware or the games it makes won’t actually become apparently until June 24, when the vote on whether or not to retain Natsuno takes place at Kadokawa’s general meeting of shareholders. Even then, a lot depends on who actually is appointed in his place, how much influence Oasis has over them, and how deeply Oasis wants to stick its hands in FromSoftware’s affairs.
