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Rumor has it that Sony is eyeing Warner Bros. Discovery’s development studios for future PlayStation acquisitions as the company is looking to offload its development teams and license its IPs. That’s according to Kinda Funny’s Imran Khan, who claims to have heard “a decent bit of chatter” about WB Discovery “shopping their game development studios around.” Interestingly, it was exactly a year ago that we heard reports of WB wanting to do away with its game development wing, especially following its merger with Discovery, but the company denied this report at the time.
Will there be more PlayStation acquisitions this year?
Sony has made it abundantly clear that it’s not done with acquisitions yet, but the company’s acquisitions have been on a completely different trajectory than Microsoft’s. The latter has been purchasing entire publishing houses while the former has focused on studios that it has been working with. If what Khan has heard is true, it looks like WB wants to sell its development studios but only “license” popular IPs, which include big hits that are too many to name. We’re talking Mortal Kombat, Batman, Middle-earth, and the list goes on. At present, WB owns a number of high-profile studios including NetherRealm, Rocksteady, Avalanche Software, Monolith, and TT Games.
Couldn’t get enough confirmation to actually write a post about it, but hearing a decent bit of chatter this week about WB Discovery shopping their game development studios around.
— Imran Khan (@imranzomg) April 29, 2022
Lending some credence to Khan’s tweet, journalist Jeff Gerstmann said that he too has been hearing this rumor on and off for a while. As some Twitter users pointed out, known insider and fellow journalist Jeff Grubb said a year ago that he had heard Microsoft was interested in purchasing NetherRealm and Rocksteady. However, following Activision Blizzard and Bethesda deals (the former of which is already being scrutinized by the FTC), and rumors of Sony working closely with Hogwarts Legacy developer Avalanche, we can only wonder what’s going on behind the scenes right now.
As for who else is interested in WB properties, Khan claims that Sony and Microsoft are joined by EA, Take-Two, Tencent, NetEase, and PUBG Corp.
In other news, Gotham Knights might be skipping last-gen consoles, and Sony has released a rather confusing PS Plus conversion chart.