Report: Sony Online Entertainment Bought for $300 Million, CEO Denies It

According to a report from the Economic Times of India, Indian company Zapak Digital is buying full rights to all content and studios currently owned by Sony Online Entertainment, a division of the Sony family, for around $300 million. However, SOE CEO John Smedley claims that the story is “completely and utterly false”.

SOE is Sony’s game development branch and has produced MMOs such as EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies. They are said to be producing revenues of around $150 million per year for Sony at the moment, but according to the Economic Times, Zapak thinks they can improve that by moving SOE’s studios over to India.

“This will reduce the cost drastically from $30 million to $10 million, which will give us the advantage to channelise our funds towards marketing and other activities,” an official from Zapak said, according to the report.

Zapak is one of the top players in the Indian gaming industry, and they have said that they want to push into the Chinese market early next year. SOE is one of the most popular MMO producers in the world. However, SOE CEO John Smedley, when asked to comment on the reported acquisition, gave this statement:

“No idea who made this up. We are in discussions with various companies in India about bringing our games to this growing market but that’s it. We aren’t for sale.”

So we’re sure this will all be cleared up soon, but maybe the Economic Times made a mistake, perhaps based on faulty information. We don’t think Smedley would flat out deny this rumor if it was true, because he’d probably look pretty bad later.

Our prediction is that the Economic Times will follow up with a correction saying that they were duped by their sources, or that the Zapat-SOE relationship is not quite what they originally reported.

Source Economic Times India and Gamernode