Guys Sony can get the money if they want, that’s the least of their problems now. Microsoft is now using a U.S. senator that chairs the US international committee to investigate Japanese market share and since Sony and the ftc said Nintendo isn’t a competitor, sony appears to have a monopoly in the high end console market there. Her job is to make sure US comp have a fair shake in foreign markets. She’s not just on the committee, she CHAIRS it. Not only that but you also have the ftc now investigating third party exclusives and if they are anticompetitive and those are the documents sony had to hand over.
So not only that but the deal is seemingly going through. If that arbitrary definition of high console market stands, sony may not even be ALLOWED to make a retaliatory acquisition in Japan. I get it all of this was unforeseen but whose ever strategy of blocking the deal so stubbornly even after the 10 year offer instead of taking advantage to acquire they’re own key partners should be fired in the most humiliating way possible. This week has been a disaster for Sony.
Even ignoring the quasi-xenophobic tendencies their rhetoric stokes (though really this should probably be blamed on Satya Nadella, considering he's the one that oddly made it sound like MS having only 4% of the Japanese gaming market should be "looked into" in that PR interview with MSNBC), even ignoring the obvious MS funding money that senator receives...
If under any circumstances they're able to BS their way into trying to suggest collusion between Sony and the Japanese government to suppress Xbox presence in Japan, rather than acknowledging the
REAL reason Microsoft is a non-competitor in that market in terms of market share, that will be a problem. Complete ignoring of the Japanese market with the XBO generation, no 1P games designed to appeal to gamers in that region, little to no efforts to secure Japanese 3P content or marketing deals that could appeal to said market, MS willingly reducing their own marketing budget in the region that generation, etc.), THOSE are the actual reasons MS's presence in Japan is so small.
To your last paragraph though, there is kind of a way Sony would be able to slip out of being locked down and make acquisitions: just make a new handheld. They could justify any acquisition as an attempt to bolster their portable offerings, since they have less than 1% of that market in Japan compared to Nintendo. They could posit having that acquired content benefit users across their gaming ecosystem, that opens the door for having PS5 versions of the games made as well, with content enrichment had from playing both versions (same way Nintendo used to do when they had separate home consoles and portables).
If a paid-off female senator wants to try locking Sony out of making Japanese acquisitions for PS5, then Sony can just find a gaming segment in Japan where they are very small and argue the acquisition is driven to make them more "competitive" in those areas they barely have a presence in. Hybrid/portable gaming devices is one area. Mobile is another although they have a bit more presence there, still nowhere at the level of some of the biggest mobile gaming providers and their market share in Japan. Or they can take yet
ANOTHER page from Microsoft's playbook and develop a mobile storefront and argue they need content from acquired Japanese devs/pubs to "fuel the beast" that is a mobile storefront, particularly to the taste of Japanese mobile gamers.
And hey, if Microsoft is able to convince that global (and especially Western) mobile gamers want access to console gaming content, why can't Sony use similar to justify acquiring a Japanese company or two for a market initiative in a part of the market they have very little presence in? Take it even further: Microsoft are acquiring a large 3P Western publisher whose biggest console-orientated games do most of their revenue in two specific Western markets where Xbox happens to be most competitive in and only two generations ago easily held majority market share in (US and UK, with the 360), but that doesn't seem to be any factor of concern in buying & leveraging that content for moves into market segments they argue they have little to no presence in.
Why can't Sony make a play for, say, Capcom or Kadokawa (or both) even if sales of their games in a "high end console market" lean heavily on PlayStation by majority, if those acquisitions can be argued as having content leveraged for bolstering Sony's presence in adjacent gaming market segments they have no presence in or very little presence in either in Japan and/or globally? Since a company like Microsoft can determine their own market position and size by limiting the scope specifically to a market where they have little presence in, Sony should technically be able to make that exact same type of definition for themselves. And if that therefore is suitable for them for a move in the Japanese market, it is a suitable thing that can be used for Western gaming acquisitions, too, even of the larger variety.
This is all in addition to knowing how these things pair with other aspects of Microsoft's strategy, like their offers to provide COD content to cloud providers, honoring providence of existing multiplatform content providing more points of access of content to gamers. Sony acquires Capcom or Square-Enix; no reason they can't allow what Switch games they were making to still come to Switch, but they'd also have grounds to provide bonus content for PlayStation owners (console, handheld, mobile) because, hey, the CMA seem to agree that partial foreclosure of COD and other ABK content on Microsoft's direct console competitor in the high-end segment is both okay and would only result in a very small shift of PS gamers to Xbox platforms
. So what would be conceptually different in the example of Sony doing similar with Capcom or Square-Enix content on their platforms and Nintendo platforms when it would fit a similar partial foreclosure definition, therefore meaning very few Nintendo players would switch to a PlayStation offering if such were done?
Meanwhile in this same scenario, Sony would have no incentive to make certain acquired content (such as new IP) once planned for Xbox & PlayStation platforms, to target Xbox platforms because they could argue that focusing the new IP on their own products & ecosystem would ensure better focus, and could argue that cutting Xbox out for these games would not result in a significant loss of revenue...again mirroring new arguments the CMA have made in regards to justifying Microsoft's decisions to make games like RedFall and Starfield console-exclusive to Xbox
. And if by some chance Sony would need to go an extra mile, for example if "certain parties" tried arguing that their position in the gaming market or specific regions of the gaming market in particular should prevent them from making such acquisitions (that is assuming the other things I just mentioned above are for some reason ignored), they could just turn it into an argument of their relative size in the tech market compared to companies like Microsoft, and that such acquisitions are needed so that they can better "compete" with companies several times their size on the global scale.
I wasn't even
kidding when I said this ABK acquisition would set a blueprint. But people like that U.S senator and the US international committee she chairs are too consumed by greed and corruption to realize that blueprint is for
MANY things, even for companies like Sony to turn a hypothetical doomsday scenario as you've described it, directly against them. These people try twisting rules and definitions so much they accidentally paint themselves right into a corner.
