Like almost all related companies this year they had the post covid bump push back to reality and the yen/dollar are fucking Japanese companies, but Sony (and particularly gaming) is already is in a growing trend since several years ago and are better than ever. Inside gaming they are growing in all areas, in many of which they already are market leader distant from MS, and CoD only represents a tiny portion of Sony's gaming business.
Sony will continue growing and making acquisitions, and it's true that the money now is better invested in something than in the bank and that to acquire Square Enix would make sense and would be the best candidates, but doesn't have any pressure at all to make big acquisitions.
In reality the ABK, SE or Capcom acquisitions don't have any reasons to be blocked by regulators.
But it could be true that Sony may already have a big acquisition secured like SE or Capcom but are waiting to announce until the ABK acquisition is done because that would help Sony.
If regulators see Sony making a big acquisition it would help approve the ABK acquisition, and Sony would prefer to see the ABK acquisition stopped or at least to secure that key IPs like CoD will continue forever on PS.
For Sony it's better don't announce anything now and add pressure to the regulators, and when the ABK will get approved (which will, because other than lying to regulators I don't see any other reason to stop it) then Sony would announce the big acquisition, telling the regulators that they had to do it do compete against and to protect their partners from acquisitions like the ABK ones.
Sony is already doing that strategy and yes, would be interested on people having and being experienced crossmedia IPs or with potential, like FF or Destiny, or liveservice games.
SE would be good for that but not CDProject, because CDP doesn't own these IPs, they only got the license to make games of these external IPs. In addition to this, CDP has several big issues to fix themselves, remember they got their game removed from PSN, so I don't think their relationship with Sony is good.
Sony can pay with a lot of things: with Sony stocks, getting money from new debt that some of the Sony banks or banks investing in Sony would give them, using cash of hand, selling some of the stuff they have, or doing what they have been doing: using the cash on hand they did set apart in a special budget for strategical investments, acquisitions and Sony stock repurchases.
As I remember that budget was for 3 or 4 FY fiscal years and they did spend a big chunk of it with many acquisitions, investments and stocks repurchased. Having a big inflation is a bad idea to have the money sitting in the bank and it's a better idea to invest it into something profitable. So this is why they are investing a lot of it.
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