I know Sony would be interested on their anime (and movie) IPs and studios and the manga IPs that use some of their animes. And their game studios and IPs. These parts can be easily integrated into Sony.
But do Sony publishes manga? And magazines? And books? And is Sony a Japanese ISP? Do they want stuff like real estate, advertising companies and other random stuff? What would Sony do with all these things?
Continue to run them as is.
The whole point of buying a company isn't to replicate the business units you already have, rather to expand into new business areas, thus reducing risk and diversifying your portfolio.
Sony wouldn't be buying Kadokawa because it will boost Sony's pre-existing media publishing, ISP and advertising enterprises. They'll be buying them to own interests in those fields Sony currently doesn't exist in. And it's not as if print manga publishing, book publishing, advertising and real-estate doesn't have any value to Sony. Sony's already a very diversified company with many fingers in many pots in many very different industries.
That said, there's nothing to say post-merger/acquisition, Sony wouldn't just sell off any Kadokawa businesses they don't see as a good fit for them, e.g. Japanese ISP. The prevailing majority of Kadokawa, however, would hold a lot of value for a company like Sony for sure.
The part of buying the company I see it very doable since Sony has more than enough money and I think most shareholders could be ok with selling it in general. The problem I see are the parts of Kadokawa -which are many companies, big ones and very well known in Japan- that I don't see fit inside Sony since Sony isn't interested in these areas.
With respect, I don't think either of us is qualified to really speak on what Sony's leadership is interested in investing in.
Sony's very unpredictable as a company overall (Playstation too, to a lesser extent). And think that demonstrates that the board of directors of Sony HQ in Japan have a very different perspective on their vision for the future of Sony as a corporation than either of us do.
So I think that the best and easiest thing for all parts would be Sony buying a huge chunk of Kadokawa shares without integrating it into Sony and to keep them as a separate, 'independent' company: doing that Sony could contol Kadokawa to make them sign exclusivity for games, movies and anime and to let Kadokawa continue handling everything else. And well, as major shareholder Sony would also get a portion of Kadokawa's profits.
This is also possible. Although I'm not sure to what extent this might trigger Japanese anti-trust laws if the two continue as two separate legal entities.
I already mentioned 343i, but you're just completely ignoring Playground, Turn 10, The Coalition etc., not to mention studios like Rare having turned things around. You're also completely ignoring the fact that different people were in charge during the period where various projects were cancelled and certain studios like Lionhead were shut down.
I'm not ignoring them at all. I just consider that a small handful of successful studios run under MGS doesn't erase the history of numerous terrible ones.
I'm not arguing that everything MS touches turns to shit. Just that a LOT of what they do seems to do so, and the 343i example shows that they haven't quite seemed to overcome this stochastic anti-Midas touch.
No one's pretending things are peachy clean and rosy over at MGS, in fact I'm sure there's some degree of issue with certain studios at all three platform holders (the workplace allegations against some of Insomniac for example), but I'm not going to pretend like they are literally doing nothing right,
Good. Because neither am I.
Essentially, all you're doing is fearmongering
Lol, this is absurd. No I'm not. Are you afraid of what I'm saying? I'll paypal you a twenty if you can find a single person in here who is.
based on past incidents that have clear factors behind them which are mostly absent now,
Er, you clearly don't have the visibility of the inner workings of MGS to conclude this. Let's not pretend that either of us do.
and ignoring the multiple examples that run counter to the ones that fit your point (which aren't necessarily that many, or at least aren't a lot more than what we've seen with Sony over the years, via a lot of the examples I listed that you seem to also conveniently ignore).
Already addressed above. This is a strawman.