Phil Spencer: "getting [acquiring] Nintendo would be a career moment for me"; Nintendo's future "exists off of their own hardware"

[Volt]

Nintendo is just going to pull up their numbers compared to the shytbox and say


I'll see a minimum wage worker buy a Lambo before Microsawft buys GOATendo.

 

[Mook]

Not enough money in this game without stealing Lmao. I'm tryna make a fighter that's class A size but with class C power. I think I gotta buy a class c shop but that'll be like 310k.

 

[Hopeofmypeople]

Microsoft is a blight on this industry

Scheming like super villains on “some we have one of our own in there it is all a course of due time mwahhahahahahahah…mwhaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…gamepass…mwahahahahahahahah”.

 

[Gizmo_Duck]

Scheming like super villains on “some we have one of our own in there it is all a course of due time mwahhahahahahahah…mwhaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…gamepass…mwahahahahahahahah”.

I read all Phil’s emails in the voice of Ultima

 

[Hopeofmypeople]

I read all Phil’s emails in the voice of Ultima

And yet I see he who shall not be named in here caping talking about Sony fans and calling them idiots. Yet not realizing Microsoft should be called out for essentially trying to monopolise the console market. Say they eventually bought Nintendo or had the majority share and then moved on to consuming Sony in a similar fashion do these retards not realise game pass can be set at whatever price they deem it being.


Hell there doesn’t have to be a game pass, you either buy what we are selling or you don’t buy at all as we have no competition and are the sole provider. I prefer PlayStation but know the benefit in them having competition.

 

[Gizmo_Duck]

And yet I see he who shall not be named in here caping talking about Sony fans and calling them idiots. Yet not realising Microsoft should be called out for essentially trying to monopolise the console market. Say they eventually bought Microsoft or had the majority share and then moved on to consuming Sony in a similar fashion do these retards not realise game pass can be set at whatever price they deem it being.


Hell there doesn’t have to be a game pass, you either buy what we are selling or you don’t buy at all as we have no competition and are the sole provider. I prefer PlayStation but know the benefit in them having competition.

Imo if you rolled with xbox through the last 10 years of trash you are too far deep to actually be logical about this

 

[winb83]

He has zero understanding of what make Nintendo work. Them buying and owning Nintendo would destroy it. The talent would bleed out until nothing of the original company before purchase would remain.

 

[winb83]

And yet I see he who shall not be named in here caping talking about Sony fans and calling them idiots. Yet not realizing Microsoft should be called out for essentially trying to monopolise the console market.

Microsoft is part of big tech. Big tech doesn't compete or know how to do that. They develop a successful product that blows up and prints money then from that point on after that initial success they use that money for M&A. Most of the time a big tech company after that initial success tries to build a product up from the ground it fails and they shut it down. Most of big tech's successes after that initial blow up are just companies they bought and integrated.

I mean you saw Google. They entered gaming with Stadia and instead of fighting to make it a success they just ended up dropping it.

The ship has sailed on a smaller Roku like company entering the console space and trying to compete with either Sony. That's not going to work. If anybody does it it will be a big tech company and Microsoft is the only one of the big techs dumb enough to try it. If you look at the numbers of consoles sold the total install base between Microsoft and Sony isn't really growing and has been stuck in the same range since the PS2 Xbox days. Nintendo's success or failure hasn't changed those numbers either.

That's why if Microsoft folds nobody else is going to look to take their place. Sony will gobble up those customers and what's the point in fighting for a limited total install base in the 180 million range when Sony has them all and traditionally gets 100-120 million of them anyway?

 

[Gizmo_Duck]

i agree with this Bloomberg piece

Microsoft Buying Nintendo Would Have Been a Disaster

The US tech giant entertained the idea of acquiring the Mario maker, but let’s keep this one in the realm of fantasy.

www.bloomberg.com

Microsoft Corp.’s video-game head Phil Spencer might have been correct when he wrote, in a piece of corporate cringe straight out of HBO’s Succession, that acquiring Nintendo Co. would be a “career moment” for him.

Spencer’s dream of buying the venerable Japanese firm was revealed, alongside other confidential plans, in an accidental leak of emails related to Microsoft’s video-game operations recently uploaded to a federal court website. The email concerning Nintendo is dated 2020; Microsoft has acknowledged the leaked documents, but says “much has changed” since they were written.

What hasn’t changed is Nintendo’s undoubted attractiveness as an asset. Even after Microsoft completes the $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard Inc., it could no doubt afford the purchase. But even if Spencer somehow convinced Nintendo’s board to agree, and assuming such a deal cleared antitrust regulators, it’s hard to conclude it would be, as he wrote, “a good move for both companies.”

Indeed, it’s tricky to imagine a greater clash of cultures. Executives at the Japanese firm famously cut their own salaries rather than lay off workers during the failure of the Wii U1; Microsoft just laid off 10,000 workers earlier this year, before reporting record revenue. The Redmond-based firm has a decades-long history of seemingly smart but ultimately poorly managed acquisitions, from Skype to Nokia.

Spencer notes that the Nintendo board “until recently has not pushed for further increases in market growth or stock appreciation,” something that, to the despair of frustrated Nintendo bulls, is true. The video-game maker stubbornly marches to the beat of its own drum; shareholders are just one consideration.

It’s “taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off their own hardware,” Spencer also wrote. The firm has remained committed to the idea that its integration of hardware and software — or in layman’s terms, the idea that Nintendo games are available only on Nintendo devices — differentiates it from the pack. Flying in the face of conventional wisdom is Nintendo’s MO; ignoring the demands in the mid-2010s that it abandon its own machines and shift to mobile gaming is the reason the company is so successful now. The Switch is in with a chance to surpass Sony Group Corp.’s PlayStation 2 to become the best-selling console ever made.

Microsoft disagrees. It’s less concerned about hardware, and sees the future of gaming on the cloud. Gamers can play, for example, Minecraft, the franchise it acquired in 2014, on Xbox, PC, mobile or even Switch. Most likely, the source of Microsoft’s interest would be Nintendo’s intellectual property: Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong and the host of other franchises. The value of these characters seems insufficiently factored into Nintendo’s share price, considering the recent success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

At least in the short run, it seems plausible that Microsoft could exploit Nintendo’s IP better than the Kyoto firm itself does. But Nintendo remains, as Spencer called it, “THE prime asset” in gaming, because of how protective it is of its properties. It hasn’t released a new mainline Mario game in six years, and it’s nearly a decade since the last new Mario Kart . Contrast that to how Microsoft has over-exploited its one-time industry-leading IPs such as the Halo series or Gears of War.

Interestingly, Spencer is not the first Microsoft executive to float this acquisition. When the US firm formed its Xbox division in the early 2000s, Nintendo was among the companies it reached out to, proposing an acquisition. It went about as well as you’d expect: “They just laughed their asses off,” one executive said years later. “Like, imagine an hour of somebody just laughing at you. That was kind of how that meeting went.”

Times have changed in Japanese corporate culture since the turn of the millennium. Foreign acquisitions of storied brands are no longer unheard of, and boards are under more pressure than ever to improve returns for shareholders. The reaction, however, to an attempted Microsoft takeover of Nintendo would likely be the same as two decades ago: laughter. (When contacted, Nintendo said it was not appropriate to comment.)

One fly in the ointment, however, might be the presence of activist investors. ValueAct Capital Partners, which built a 2% stake in Nintendo in 2020, has been holding discussions with management, though unlike some of its other dealings in Japan, the fund has not taken its push public. Another thing to note is Nintendo’s second-largest shareholder — Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has been building interests in video-game firms in Japan and beyond, while saying little about their purpose.

After seeing one beloved Japanese asset shockingly acquired, with animator Studio Ghibli being bought by a local broadcaster, the idea that Nintendo could fall into foreign hands will concern proponents of soft power. But thankfully, it seems unlikely this deal will make it out of level one.

 

[Rice N Beans]

At least in the short run, it seems plausible that Microsoft could exploit Nintendo’s IP better than the Kyoto firm itself does. But Nintendo remains, as Spencer called it, “THE prime asset” in gaming, because of how protective it is of its properties. It hasn’t released a new mainline Mario game in six years, and it’s nearly a decade since the last new Mario Kart. Contrast that to how Microsoft has over-exploited its one-time industry-leading IPs such as the Halo series or Gears of War.

Nice to see broader recognition that Nintendo's franchises would be run into the ground in the hands of MS. Just no real mental input on their end for their current stable. Halo languished from inept management and they did not throw the life preserver, but instead went to buy the franchise they wanted Halo turned into with CoD.

They'd probably turn Smash Bros into a SF clone, Metroid into a DooM clone, and Zelda into some Bethesda garbage rather than just making them fun.

 

[Diondon]

"It's a good move" What a fukking idiot

 

[Gizmo_Duck]

 

[Diondon]

First time he touched greatness

 

[THE 101]

"Make my Halo, fakkit"

 

[ORDER_66]

"Make my Halo, fakkit"