Sony is in talks to buy Kadokawa, the owner of Japanese board game publisher and Tokyo Game Market organiser Arclight
Video game and electronics giant Sony is in talks to buy the $2.7bn parent business of Arclight, one of Japan’s biggest board game publishers and the organiser of Tokyo Game Market.
PlayStation maker Sony already owns a 2% stake in Kadokawa Group, which also controls Elden Ring and Dark Souls video game maker FromSoftware and a plethora of other businesses across book, manga and magazine publishing, film and anime.
Kadokawa confirmed on November 20 that it had received an initial letter of intent from Sony to acquire the company’s shares, but added that no decision had been made.
A deal could be wrapped up within weeks according to Reuters, which cited two unknown sources who said talks were ongoing between Sony and Kadokawa.
The potential deal comes just over six months after Kadokawa bought Arclight as part of its continued push to create new IP and “deploy ideas across different types of media”.
Examples of that mixed-media strategy include the announcement in February that Elden Ring would be adapted into a webcomic, and the deal bolstered the chances of FromSoftware titles and other Kadokawa IPs being turned into new tabletop games.
Sony, a $120bn electronics powerhouse, has a string of its own IP from its PlayStation video gaming arm which could be realised in board game form if the deal goes ahead.
The company has already licensed out several of its biggest name video game IPs to become tabletop creations, most notably Steamforged Games’ production of Horizon: Zero Dawn, which raised almost £1.4m from nearly 10,000 backers on Kickstarter in 2018.
Other heavyweight PlayStation titles receiving board game adaptations in recent years include The Last of Us, which was Kickstarted by Themeborne at the end of 2022, and God of War, which picked up about $830,000 on Gamefound in April in a campaign run by crowdfunded board game major CMON.
Having a huge corporate owner such as Sony could prove an immense boost to Arclight, both in terms of the resources it has to make games, and the global network such a giant business can leverage.
But small, niche operations within larger businesses can also fall foul of corporate strategy following takeovers – being downsized, repurposed, sold off or simply left to wither on the vine.
This summer Dicebreaker – one of the vanishingly few tabletop journalism outlets whose reporting went beyond new game announcements and reviews – was shuttered just three weeks after its parent business Gamer Network was bought by video game news and reviews major IGN.
Arclight has a long history in Japan’s tabletop gaming industry, having launched in 1998 to manage what was Japan’s largest tabletop RPG event, Japan Game Convention.
The company runs 32 Hobby Station trading card game retail stores in Japan, having opened its first outlet in 2003. A year later it began importing and selling overseas board games, and in 2005 started a localisation business to convert those games for the Japanese market.
Arclight started hosting and operating Game Market in 2010 – a tabletop gaming event which now runs three times a year in Tokyo and Osaka. April’s event in Tokyo attracted about 25,000 visitors.
