Why did Sony not acquire the Crash Bandicoot ip when it was new?

[Uncle Jon]

I grew up around the era of the ps1 and n64 era, I was a Nintendo kid but I played some Playstation games growing up. I never played the Crash games as a kid but I did play the Spyro ones. I always associated the Spyro and Crash ips with Sony, but apparently Sony "never owned" them. Both series went downhill I think after the PS1 era, the Spyro ip was sold off because the developers couldn't think of anything else to do with him in games and its why in the third Spyro game that one had different playable characters, dunno why Crash was sold though or if he was ever sold?

I do find it odd how from the start Sony did not buy the rights to that franchise since Crash used to be their mascot. Sony is very inconsistent on who is the mascot for the Playstation brand, Sega had Sonic, and Nintendo had Mario of course. It's just that I remembered that they had advertisements for the Crash games where a guy in a Crash Bandicoot outfit who would trash talk on Nintendo back in the day when game companies used to talk trash on other consoles in commercials which they don't really do anymore. Apparently Sony won't buy the rights because the brand is too expensive now, but why didn't they back in the day when they invested in the character in being their mascot when he was a brand new ip? I don't know how popular Crash was as a mascot, was he anywhere as popular as Mario or Sonic? I would have imagined he helped selling Playstations with his brand.

[TheMoonRover]

That's just how PlayStation operated at first. They were really pushing games by third-party developers. Universal Interactive got the rights to Crash Bandicoot as part of the publication deal for the first game in 1996, and the same for Spyro in 1998. Through a series of company mergers, Crash and Spyro ended up with Vivendi Games, then Activision, and now Microsoft, but the franchises themselves were never sold.