PlayStation Acquires Valkyrie Entertainment - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 10 December 2021 / 3,391 Views
Sony Interactive Entertainment announced it has acquired support studio Valkyrie Entertainment.
Valkyrie Entertainment previously supported Sony Santa Monica Studio on God of War (2018), as well as the upcoming God of War: Ragnarok. The studio also supported development on Halo Infinite, Forza Motorsport 7, and more.
"Today we announce Valkyrie Entertainment will be joining the PlayStation Studios family," said PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst. "The studio will be making invaluable contributions to key PlayStation Studios franchises"
Today we announce @valkyrieent will be joining the PlayStation Studios family. The studio will be making invaluable contributions to key PlayStation Studios franchises pic.twitter.com/sNTugminD5
— Hermen Hulst (@hermenhulst) December 10, 2021
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Good acquisition to help support their studios and keep pumping out AAA first party blockbusters at a good speed. Thankfully an acquisition that doesn't take away games from competitors.
If we're going to have the industry carved up by hardware platforms, Nintendo needs to step it up. A good first place to start on acquisitions for them would be Koei Tecmo.
Interesting that they also have two in-house games in development while also helping create other studio's games. They are some hard workers.
wow didnt know it supported big 1st party games from both xbox and playstation!
Valkyrie Entertainment is an independent video game developer!
Sony seems to be in need of support studios. Side effect of games becoming bigger and bigger
I agree with games becoming bigger and bigger but it's not just a Sony issue rather than an industry issue overall. Microsoft is in a similar situation with having to contract CD from Square just to finish Perfect Dark.
Halo Infinite had 4 studios other than 343 supporting it's development so yeah it's a huge issue lol.
Games are selling more.. And in order to compete in a big slice of the market there is a push to invest more.
Which means that the scale, cost and resources of game development increases.
It doesn't mean profits are any less and rising development costs unsustainable... Publishers/developers are constantly posting profit records.
Could just be the beginning for them. Sony seems to handle all this studios stuff very slowly. First you work with them on projects with other studios as just a contractor. Then they have you come on and help studios or remake games. Then your own project to work on. Almost like the bigger studios help show the newersmaller ones how things are done first and use that experience to make their own games.
With Sony planning to move more of their catalogue to PC, support studios will become more important as that will increase strain on Sony's first-party studios. I know Sony has acquired some studios that specialize in PC ports, but long-term I predict that the delay between PS and PC releases will shrink, until they're eventually doing simultaneous cross-platform development for at least some of their games. Consider that the two games they worked on for Microsoft, Forza Motorsport 7 and Halo Infinite, were cross-developed between Xbox and PC simultaneously. It would be interesting to know what exactly Valkyrie did for Xbox Game Studios.
What do they mean by support exactly? They help Santa Monica with the workload?
Have you noticed their name is Valkyrie so obviously they supplied The Valkyrie's for God of War and when Kratos defeated them Sony grabbed them for themselves.
Sony's CFO last year in a quarterly statement specifically mentioned that they had the capacity for large scale acquisitions and had $ 27 billion US in cash and liquidity to use without needing to use their lines of credit , he made the point to allay misconceptions about Sony 's capacity to make large scale purchases.
Acquisitions are typically not funded all with cash. So, having 27 billion of cash and liquid assets does not mean they can't spend more than 27 billion. Acquisitions are often funded with debt (they borrow the money) even when the cash is available.
Also, acquisitions are often funded by exchanging equity. Let's say Sony wanted to buy a 30 billion dollar company. They don't have 30 billion available, and they don't want to take on 30 billion dollars of debt. So, they essentially give the owners of the company 30 billion dollars worth of Sony stock. Or maybe 10 billion dollars worth of Sony stock, and 20 billion of cash, 15 billion of which they borrow.
Anyway, the point is that a company's ability to acquire other companies is not limited to what it can do with cash on hand.
No one is saying they will ,just pointing out the can and they have made large acquisitions in the past and have spent multiple billions this year on crunchy roll and other acquisitions, the fact is neither one wants a tit for tat spending spree , MS because Xbox isn't that big in the scheme of all things MS and while 7 billion is fine and they will continue to invest , if they went overboard they risk other large tech giants joining in a grab what you can before it's all bought up scenario,the other is it has to make financial sense and a good return , Sony knows it can't win a bidding war but it can be selective and doesn't need to buy studios outright, just do enough to ensure they keep the games on PS
We weren't talking about Ms capability we were talking about Sony's , this started with you disagreeing with Dallinor.
The part about no one is saying they will is when this has come up before people after hearing the CFO's comments act has if they will spend it all so good for you .
what it boils down to is he was indirectly showing that they can if the situation suits them do a similar sized purchase without it hurting them , but it all comes down to need another thing to remember a lot of these purchases are done one to one and so don't get out to the market till they all but done.
I'll take the CFO opinion over yours and like i said if Sony finds something large it doesn't necessarily mean a bidding war and why would they do it with just cash it could be done has VAMatt explained with borrowing it's a low interest world or equity or cash or most like a combination.
You are talking about capacity when you say its to risky , even if they used cash spending 7 billion would still leave them with $ 20 billion, for future use 4 billion cash and 16 billion in liquidity and those reserves are growing at there fastest rate ever so the only risk would be the investment itself .
Because you keep moving away from the original point that is Sony financially being able to make a zenimax size purchase and MS isn't fine with it it the zenimax deal was a strategic decision to support Game pass plus you assume those companies would simply roll over or other big tech giants would join in any way this is just side tracking like I said it has nothing to do with the original reply to Dallinor
I have outlined why they can and still have plenty of capital left as for moving the goal posts go back to your original post and Dalinor's reply you were contending that it wasn't financially viable for them to make a similar size purchase when it was shown that they could, you moved onto supposing what it may or may not lead to ,
I'm done here you are to stubborn go argue with Rol
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