A Chinese company has been buying shares since March to steer the fate of FromSoftware (Elden Ring) with its growing influence on Kadokawa. Fans are already fearing the worst.
What happened? FromSoftware, the popular studio behind milestones like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, is known to be a subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation. However, power dynamics have been shifting for several months:
- Since March 2026, Oasis Management has been aggressively buying shares and is said to currently own 13.76 percent of Kadokawa. Thus, the fund is now the largest shareholder, ahead of Sony.
- In May, Oasis Management launched the campaign “A Better KADOKAWA”. The goal: to prevent the reappointment of president Takeshi Natsuno at the next annual general meeting.
- However, the board of Kadokawa supports Takeshi Natsuno, which has hardened the fronts between the board and Oasis.
The latest trailer for the current project from FromSoftware:
What is Oasis planning? Fund officials criticize that the current management is unnecessarily letting profits slip away. For example, through collaborations with publishers like BANDAI NAMCO and Activision, who retain an unreasonably large portion of the revenue. FromSoftware is absolutely capable of bringing its own games to market globally.
Oasis Management has previously drawn attention for trying to tell globally successful game companies how to make even more money. In 2013 and 2014, for instance, they wanted to exert pressure on Nintendo president Satoru Iwata and push through various demands to increase sales and profits. This included among others the following points:
- Selling games only on their own Nintendo console was too high a hurdle; they needed to bring their successful IPs to other platforms. Oasis pointed especially to King’s success with Candy Crush Saga and the growth of mobile/digital platforms.
- The shareholder also pointed out the potential of in-app purchase revenue models. A sentence from the document to Nintendo went down in history: “[…] to imagine one has to pay 99 cents for Mario to jump a little higher.”
The Maestro jumps over his shadow and speaks out
Even Hidetaka Miyazaki speaks out: The president and game director of FromSoftware typically keeps statements to a minimum and avoids the public spotlight. In this case, he states that he is “generally satisfied with the current development environment at FromSoftware”.
Maintaining this environment, which allows the team to focus solely on game production, is the most important thing for him and the studio.
If Oasis Management were to take noticeable influence on FromSoftware at some point, it could be—at least that’s how his statement sounds to us—that Hidetaka Miyazaki and Co. would need to look for a different environment. That would be the end of the FromSoftware we have known for years.
How does the community react? With great concern. After all, the studio is known for very special gaming experiences that cannot be found elsewhere in this form and quality.
- VLamperouge writes on Reddit: “Get ready for Elden Ring Gacha.”
- Tac0Destroyer also sees a dark future on Reddit: “The headline in a year: The best creatives of the team leave FromSoftware to form a new studio.”
- unscoredscore explains on Reddit: “The last time there were issues with shareholders (with Tencent and Kakao), Kadokawa reached out to Sony and asked the company to buy them, which almost happened. They would rather be owned by a Japanese company than ever let a foreign company take control, ESPECIALLY a Chinese or Korean one.”
What do you think? Could you imagine a FromSoftware guided by a Chinese corporation with profit maximization goals in mind? Let us know in the comments! Already, the studio behind classics like Dark Souls is implementing some service games that may not necessarily be at the top of players’ wish lists: Creators of Elden Ring briefly showcase their new project and even the biggest fans can’t believe it
Your opinion is important to us!
Do you like the article? Then let us know!