Sony Corporation in talks to buy Kadokawa Corporation

Wait, does this apply to Kadokawa Group as a whole or just the anime/gaming section? Kadokawa owns BookWalker, does this mean Sony will own BookWalker as well? Are all my LN purchases screwed!? I mean CR buys Funimation and suddenly ppl are losing access to their purchases... Who says the same cannot happen with Sony...

What abt their publishing itself (manga & LN)? Will it be owned by F*ing Sony as well?

I'm sorry, but I don't really care for the anime & gaming sections, I'm much more concerned abt the manga & LN side instead....

@uncleqrow This purchase applies to everything Kadokawa owns, meaning all anime and software and subsidiaries (every publishing branch included).

This is the beginning of the death of the anime industry, prepare for more censorship and more western crap in your anime.... RIP, it was fun while it lasted

I don't like Kadokawa and its practices but the sonyfication of kadokawa will turn the sour cheese rancid and we all know how great monopolies go for any industry.




and why is it a wrong concern? Censorship doesn't just apply to ecchi and woke content but also to creative freedom in general, Disney doesn't just restrict "anti-woke" content but also content that it deems too radical or inappropriate in its animated movies. Also, the bigger the corporation, the lesser the risks it's willing to take with its products so you will see fewer new ideas and more generic run-of-the-mill shows

"Censorship and Western crap" and it's literally the company that made ecchi anime like Eromanga Sensei and My Dress-Up Darling.
Also you literally have anime produced by Sony on your favs, as well as a Sony owned studio in your fav companies...

Why would it be dead? Why there's no reason to believe it won't?

Considering the shows they helped produce in the past, I fail to see why they would kill an entire anime project...

What censorship?
I didn't see any censorship on MDUD.
Also Kadokawa is not a studio, they are a producer, so if any company is not giving studios the freedom of what shows they are in charge in, it's Kadokawa who is pushing their anime studios with their 40 anime a year plan.

Unless they also own Sentai Filmworks' parent company, AMC Networks (which they don't seem to) they wouldn't quite hold a monopoly in anime streaming and licensing just yet.

But owning Kadokawa would mean owning all of the series that Sentai licenses that are worth anything at all (like No Game No Life), so they could presumably give the licensing for those works to Crunchyroll, which they do own.

So they're definitely getting closer to becoming a monopoly. Not a huge fan of that, but if we end up getting No Game No Life season 2 out of it then I can't complain too much.

@ShatteredSans I would say that with Sony you can definitely forget about a second season of NGNL... imagine if the minds behind Concord would start dealing with a story of incest between brothers with all that mild nudity lmao

Oh boy, here's to another studio not being able to have freedom of what shows they get to be in charge of. And people do have a right to be concerned about censorship since it's modern Sony we're talking about here. Look at a number of shows Kadokawa has a big part in and it's rather worrying what Sony would do with the acquisition.
@animegamer245 Don't forget the double standard Sony has to new Japanese games, many Western games get to have full nudity or sex scene, but Japanese games get hit with censored CG scenes or modified costumes. (some VN's on PS4/5 have light censors on swimsuit scenes, not joking)

Maybe capitalism indeed went too far.
First hollywood and now anime yeah we are fkd.

@Tropisch

You realize they've made Western games get edited too right? Doki Doki Literature Club Plus had to on PlayStation due to their policies. I think its generally just an art style thing as they seem to be more ok with sexual content and extreme violence when the art style is realistic rather than cartoony as 99% of the games that are edited on PlayStation have a more animated art style with the exception of like Devil May Cry V Special Edition. They also don't seem to be doing it as much as these days so you should worry less about censorship and more about the anti-consumer nature of all these mergers and how it hinders competition and innovation in these industries

@WaterMage

Holllywood, Star Wars, Marvel, western comics, YouTube, the Gaming industry, and even the internet itself all eventually got fucked by becoming too mainstream

and with Japan's rapidly declining birthrate and unsustainable cultural practices, their industries are only gonna get more and more desperate meaning more and more dumb business decisions made by old men who don't know whats going on anymore or how to fix anything

so yea, people who aren't scared for manga/anime just don't give a shit

@Tropisch

You realize they've made Western games get edited too right? Doki Doki Literature Club Plus had to on PlayStation due to their policies. I think its generally just an art style thing as they seem to be more ok with sexual content and extreme violence when the art style is realistic rather than cartoony as 99% of the games that are edited on PlayStation have a more animated art style with the exception of like Devil May Cry V Special Edition. They also don't seem to be doing it as much as these days so you should worry less about censorship and more about the anti-consumer nature of all these mergers and how it hinders competition and innovation in these industries

If you need to know what this portents, take a good long look at what's happened with Funimation and Crunchyroll. Sony's sunk Funimation completely, and they're slowly but surely destroying CR, as well. It ain't gonna be pretty. Give up all hope, ye who enter here.