The obsession with Square is indeed brain dead fear. Pollutes all sensible discussion. Square won't do shit. People need to stop pushing for a Square acquisition.
The war is for the FPS, WRPG western audience, not the JRPG, weeb audience. Square and its IPs won't help in any significant fashion. But who am I kidding, won't stop weebs from pushing for a Square acquisition under the guise of "do something". So fucking stupid from my POV but ohh well.
It's about what IPs, deprivation of, hurts your competitor the most to ship consoles and makes your ecosystem less desirable. If MS was a full blown third party publisher with no console platform operation we wouldn't be having this discussion in the first place. The threat wouldn't be high. But they do, as a direct Sony PlayStation competitor, and MS is also pushing PC, an indirect one. They'll do it through exclusion of IP's or suppression (first or better or whatever scheme).
There are a million ways to go about revenue - if it's just a coffer operation. So yes, it's all about the First Person Shooter (shooters in general) and Western RPG audience - thus a western audience of NA/EU and not weebs or the JRPG crowd.
End of discussion. Square has been a massive failure trying to compete for the western audience in those areas, thus the divesture and sale of their western oriented IPs and studios. How obvious does this have to be? They're one of the least adequate publishers out there that can provide any significant advantage to Sony in this regard.
Respectfully, I think you're being too dismissive of Japanese publishers here, especially Square-Enix. It can't simply be an end-game of consolidating big Western moneymakers for Sony because if that results in a shift of priority content straying too far from their gaming roots, a lot of enthusiasts will leave. And since many enthusiasts tend to be early adopters, and set the "mood of discourse" as it were to influence casuals and mainstream into which ecosystems to invest into down the line, this ironically would significantly hurt Sony with casuals and mainstream audiences as well.
Again, games like Final Fantasy XIV and Monster Hunter are big money makers. Not at COD levels, nor do they need to be. XVI's done 3+ million globally and I'd reckon a large majority have been in America, a Western market, so to say Final Fantasy, or games like Street Fighter for that matter, don't have Western appeal or are only for weebs is incorrect. Being known as the "FPS box" is what the 360 eventually became known for and coincidentally that was right around the time enthusiasts started looking elsewhere, such as the PS3, for a greater variety of AAA games (MS zeroing in on casuals with Kinect didn't help them either).
I'm not saying Western publishers aren't valuable, or that Sony can afford to ignore investing into publishers like EA or Take-Two. But that's exactly where I think it should stay: investment into them, not outright acquisition. They can get just as much out of those publishers by doing key financial investments and big share purchases as they would through an acquisition, and save on a lot of money along the way (as well as not needing to account for tons of redundancies). However, if they're going to try acquiring publishers, like others are saying, Japanese publishers would be more realistic and also more affordable.
And some in particular, like Square-Enix and Capcom, do in fact have a good number of Western-appealing IP as well as games popular in ROTW territories. More importantly, they have a lot of IP that do very popular for transmedia properties too, like Final Fantasy, MegaMan, Resident Evil, etc. Across film, television, animation, merchandise, manga, music etc. The same simply can't be said for pretty much any of the big Western 3P publishers in all honesty.
