Move Over Sony? Activist Investor Who Urged Nintendo to Charge 99 Cents Just to Get Mario to Jump Higher Acquires Significant Stake in Parent Company of Elden Ring Dev FromSoftware

Activist investor Oasis Management Company has acquired a 8.86% in Japanese media powerhouse Kadokawa, parent company of Elden Ring developer FromSoftware, according to Gamebiz and Automaton.

This is a big enough stake to potentially enable the investor to influence Kadokawa’s operations. Back in 2014, Oasis encouraged Nintendo to pivot towards developing free-to-play mobile games, saying: “Just think of paying 99 cents just to get Mario to jump a little higher.”

An activist investor is an individual or company that aims to purchase a significant minority stake in other companies so that they can influence how they are operated or managed, usually with the aim of bolstering shareholder returns.

So what’s the attraction of Kadokawa? The Kadokawa Group contains a large number of subsidiaries dealing with publishing, anime, movies and games (plus other industries). These include Dark Souls and Elden Ring developer FromSoftware, as well as videogame publisher Spike Chunsoft, which is owned by its Dwango subsidiary. It’s also a major manga publisher, and popular anime produced by Kadokawa include Oshi no ko, Re: Zero, and Delicious in Dungeon, among many others.

With so many IPs and diverse businesses, Kadokawa is a hot property. Back in late 2024, it was widely rumored that Sony would acquire Kadokawa (source: Reuters). What ended up happening instead was that Sony became one of Kadokawa’s biggest shareholders, with a 10% stake. The two companies also entered a strategic partnership with the aim of strengthening the global value of both companies’ IPs (think anime co-productions and using Sony’s well-established international publishing channels to bring Kadokawa’s works to a wider audience).

To put things into perspective, Oasis Management Company’s 8.86% stake in Kadokawa is not that much smaller than Sony’s. (As of March 2025, Kadokawa’s top three shareholders, including Sony, each had a 10% stake.) Oasis has yet to make any public demands to Kadokawa, so it is not currently clear how they may seek to influence the Japanese conglomerate.

However, Oasis’s past moves have included attempts to sway Nintendo. Back in 2014, Oasis published an open letter to then Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, urging the Japanese company to enter the mobile games market and to focus on that instead of consoles. Using Netflix and other companies’ success as examples, the letter argued that accessibility was key, suggesting Nintendo sell mobile games featuring popular IPs like Mario and Zelda on Google Play and Apple App store, instead of having their games behind the hurdle of purchasing a console. Oasis then suggested that Nintendo should release free-to-play mobile games with in-game purchases, with chief investment officer Seth Fischer issuing the immortal line:

“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.”

After this letter, Nintendo continued to develop consoles, releasing the highly successful Nintendo Switch and its successor, the Switch 2. However, it also entered the realm of smartphone offerings (although whether this had anything to do with Oasis’s suggestions in 2013 and 2014 is unclear). Nintendo and The Pokémon Company released the global hit Pokémon Go in 2016, with Super Mario Run also hitting mobile platforms in the same year.

Last month, it was reported that Bluepoint, the studio behind the successful Shadow of the Colossus and Demon’s Souls remakes, pitched a Bloodborne remake last year that was rejected not by Sony, as many had thought, but by FromSoftware. FromSoftware is currently working on The Duskbloods, a similarly vampire-themed game exclusive to Nintendo Switch 2, and continues to update multiplayer game Elden Ring: Nightreign.

Verity Townsend is a Japan-based freelance writer who previously served as editor, contributor and translator for the game news site Automaton West. She has also written about Japanese culture and movies for various publications.