Why did Konami absorb Hudson Soft?
The chain starts with a bank, not a game. Hudson was hit hard by the collapse of its main bank, the Hokkaido Takushoku Bank, and sought new financing by listing on the stock market in December 2000. A listed company can be bought, and in August 2001 Konami purchased an allocation of 5.6 million shares, becoming Hudson's largest shareholder in a single move. Contemporary reporting on the later stages is consistent about what Konami wanted: Hudson's catalog of durable series, Bomberman above all, and its strength in mobile and social games, a field where Hudson had moved early.
Control followed in April 2005, when a capital increase left Konami holding 53.99 percent of Hudson. Hudson was now a Konami subsidiary with its own name still on the door. The finish came in two dated steps. On January 20, 2011 Konami announced it would make Hudson wholly owned through a share exchange; the transaction closed on April 1, 2011, Hudson's stock was delisted, its chief executive resigned, and its American subsidiary, Hudson Entertainment, was liquidated. Then, on January 12, 2012, the boards of Hudson and Konami Digital Entertainment agreed to merge, and on March 1, 2012 Hudson Soft ceased to exist, absorbed into Konami Digital Entertainment, with its music business passing to Konami's music company.
The reason formally given for the final merger was consolidation, bringing Hudson's and Konami Digital Entertainment's overlapping operations into a single company. Two honest cautions belong on the record. The merger was agreed by both subsidiaries' boards rather than imposed in a single unilateral act, and no opened source documents a single dramatic cause, no scandal and no collapse, behind the 2012 dissolution itself. The accurate summary is the dull one, and it is the one the dates support: a weakened company sold a stake to survive, the buyer converted the stake into control, then into ownership, then into a line in its own corporate structure. The games survived the process. The company did not.