Miyazaki Says FromSoftware Can Still Make What It Wants

When an activist hedge fund starts publicly arguing that your most acclaimed studio is being mismanaged, you'd expect the person running that studio to have something to say. Hidetaka Miyazaki, director of Elden Ring and president of FromSoftware, kept it characteristically brief. In a statement to Denfaminico Gamer, Miyazaki said the studio can "freely make the kind of games we want to make without excessive interference," and that maintaining that environment is his top priority.

The statement lands in the middle of an increasingly public fight between Kadokawa Corporation, which owns 70% of FromSoftware, and Hong Kong-based Oasis Management. Oasis now holds a 13.76% stake in Kadokawa, according to its own investor materials, making it the company's largest single shareholder, ahead of Sony's 11.01%. Oasis is pushing to remove Kadokawa CEO Takeshi Natsuno at the company's annual general meeting on June 24, arguing that his leadership has left shareholder value on the table.

FromSoftware is central to that argument. In a presentation to investors, Oasis pointed out that over 90% of Elden Ring's sales came from outside Japan, where Bandai Namco handled publishing. Kadokawa, Oasis claims, "benefitted little" from the game's global success because it let an external partner capture most of the revenue. The fund has been pushing Kadokawa toward self-publishing since 2020, and it wants the next FromSoftware blockbuster to keep all that money in-house.

On paper, the self-publishing argument isn't absurd. FromSoftware already owns the Elden Ring trademark outright, meaning a hypothetical Elden Ring 2 wouldn't need Bandai Namco at all. And The Duskbloods, the studio's next announced title, is fully owned and published by FromSoftware. The direction Oasis wants may already be happening organically, which makes the aggressive push to unseat Natsuno feel less like strategic vision and more like a power grab dressed in spreadsheets. Natsuno wasn't even CEO until 2021, well after the Bandai Namco deals for Elden Ring were signed.

The $0.99 Mario Problem

The reason this story has gamers nervous instead of bored goes back to 2014, when Oasis made headlines suggesting Nintendo should pivot to free-to-play mobile games and charge players $0.99 to make Mario jump higher. It was framed as an illustration of monetisation potential, not a literal product pitch, but it revealed exactly how Oasis thinks about games: as revenue streams with untapped extraction potential. Apply that thinking to FromSoftware, a studio whose entire identity is built on uncompromising design, and the anxiety writes itself.

Oasis's own language doesn't help. Its pitch calls for Kadokawa's next CEO to have "a proven track record in global IP monetisation, operational discipline, sound capital allocation, and strong governance." Not a single word about creative quality. Not one mention of what makes FromSoftware's games sell 30 million copies in the first place. I've read enough corporate strategy decks to know that when the word "monetisation" appears three times before "game" appears once, the priorities are clear.

What makes Miyazaki's response interesting is what he didn't say. He acknowledged he's aware of the situation but said he couldn't address it in depth. He didn't defend Natsuno. He didn't criticise Oasis. He simply drew a line around the thing he cares about: the development environment. "If we have been able to create something valuable for our users up until now, I believe one of the major sources of that has been the environment we have been working in," he said, per a machine translation of his comments. He also slipped in a tease, asking fans to look forward to "both the announced and unannounced titles to come."

That's the real signal here. Miyazaki isn't panicking, and he isn't posturing. He's doing what he always does: staying focused on the work while politely reminding everyone that the work is what generates the value in the first place. Whether that message lands with whoever controls Kadokawa after June 24 is a different matter. Kadokawa held a preliminary vote in May that went against unseating Natsuno, and the company announced on June 3 that it will formally oppose the dismissal proposal at the annual meeting. But Oasis has been building its stake steadily, and activist investors don't tend to walk away quietly.

On June 8, Japan's Fair Trade Commission found FromSoftware in violation of the country's Freelancers Protection Act over mismanaged payment deadlines for more than 100 freelancers, a ruling Oasis quickly folded into its case against current leadership. The June 24 shareholder meeting will determine whether Natsuno stays, and with it, whether the people who think FromSoftware's biggest problem is leaving money with Bandai Namco get closer to the levers.