8.86% of FromSoftware's majority owner, Kadokawa Games, is now owned by an investor who infamously made a terrible pitch to Nintendo a decade ago.
As reported by GameBiz (spotted and translated by Automaton), Oasis Management Company, a Hong Kong-based international hedge fund management firm, has acquired an 8.86% share of Kadokawa, the Japanese media conglomerate behind a number of manga, anime, and video game properties. Oasis describes its acquisition of shares as being for "important proposal activities."
Most notably, the company is a majority owner of Dark Souls and Elden Ring developer FromSoftware, with Sony its next-largest shareholder after talks to acquire the company.
In a 2014 request, Oasis urged then-Nintendo president Satoru Iwata to develop Nintendo games for mobile devices, which it later did with games like Super Mario Run, Pikmin Bloom, and Fire Emblem Heroes. That wasn't an uncommon request. However, this same group is best known for saying, "We believe Nintendo can create very profitable games based on in-game revenue models with the right development team. Just think of paying 99 cents just to get Mario to jump a little higher," and have since been ridiculed for it in the decade since.
Of course, Nintendo did not, in fact, charge players 99 cents to make Mario jump higher, because Nintendo understands how video games work. That being said, that was over a decade ago now. Nintendo did enter the mobile game market, and aside from Super Mario Run and the best Nintendo mobile game, Dr. Mario World, it seems to have been pretty successful. And perhaps a decade of ridicule over that comment would have caused the minds behind it to understand games a bit more. Regardless, I don't expect we'll be paying 99 cents to post "try finger, but hole" in Elden Ring 2.
