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Discussion Why Nintendo probably won't make many (or any) major acquisitions in the gaming space in the near future.

I

ItWasMeantToBe19

Manakete
Just wanted to add my (somewhat long) thoughts about this in thread form as this discourse is pretty frequent and frustrating.


1. Buying a publisher is generally not good for consumers, but it also can be bad for the publishers doing the purchase themselves.

Microsoft has bought publishers because they're desperate for IP and devs, but it adds a massive amount of redundancies that make it hard to swallow if you're not very desperate.

You end up adding


Another localization department
Another overseas publishing department
Another marketing department
Another QA department
Another customer service department
Another indie relations department


And so on and so forth.

You probably need more people in these departments after you expand… But not as many as you absorb from buying another publisher.

What happens a lot of time following consolidation like this is layoffs and the closure of the redundant department, which are both bad in general and actually pretty expensive for the business doing the purchase. Nintendo seems to try to avoid doing layoffs so if they buy a publisher, they’ll end up just paying a ton of people to do things that… They already have other people doing…


2. Other gaming publishers have diversified and licensed so much that their purchase would lead to significant headaches for Nintendo.

Let’s look at the most discussed potential gaming purchase for Nintendo, Sega. If Nintendo buys Sega, they are inheriting:


Total War and its developer
Football Manager and its developer
Phantasy Star Online 2 and its developer
Angry Birds and its developer
Two Point Campus/Hospital and its developer
Relic (an RTS studio)
Amplitude (a studio that makes Civ-like titles)
Other mobile devs


These games… CAN transition over to console… But that’s not where their audience is.

Mobile games like Angry Birds may be OK for Nintendo to publish, but I’m very uncertain if Nintendo would want to publish PC games at all. It would start constant rumors about if Nintendo would follow the lead of Microsoft and Sony of publishing other first-party games on PC. Nintendo could create a separate publishing label for PC games, but this would also be a pain. They could try to sell off parts of the publisher they bought that they don’t want, but this could be even harder.

Let’s look at the publisher that most desperately wants to be bought, EA. If Nintendo buys EA, they now have to deal with licensing deals for FC, the NFL, college football, Star Wars (four separate Star Wars sub-franchises at a minimum!), Iron Man, Black Panther, UFC, and so on and so forth. They will be losing a huge chunk of revenue to Disney and other partners for their upcoming games, may have to keep many games multiplatform (Madden in particular), and have to deal with many other contract headaches. Namco offers similar issues with their anime licensing.

Other publishers have a lot of non-gaming stuff Nintendo would have no interest in. If Konami is purchased by Nintendo, Nintendo can now own a bunch of gyms and gambling machines and a bunch of other random non-gaming stuff….. I don’t know if they want more (or any?) of these?


3. You can want to buy a developer or publisher, but they have to want to be bought.

I mean, you can do a hostile takeover of some publicly traded company but… That’s a really bad idea as then the devs could just leave.

And many devs aren’t publicly traded and many publishers have family ownership.


4. Nintendo has generally bought devs they have a relationship with.

Nintendo’s recent purchases were of Nintendo Pictures, Next Level Games, and SRD. Nintendo Pictures (formerly Dynamo Pictures) was not that close with Nintendo (having worked on only Other M and some Pikmin shorts for Nintendo IIRC), but SRD had been a Nintendo partner since… Literally the early 1980s and Next Level Games had been working exclusively with Nintendo for many years prior to their purchase. It’s possible Nintendo could buy a developer that they have very little working experience with, but I would assume they would not and I feel this assumption is fairly reasonable (if Nintendo was interested in buying someone, they would probably have them work on something first imo). With this assumption in mind, let’s look at some of their partners.



Extremely close

Game Freak (Pokemon)

Creatures (Pokemon)

HAL (Kirby)

Intelligent Systems (Fire Emblem, Paper Mario, and WarioWare)

Camelot (Mario Sports, Golden Sun)

Very close

Namco Studio S and associated technology team (Smash Bros, Mario Sports, and Mario Kart)

Good Feel (recent Yoshi titles, Kirby Epic Yarn, Wario Land Shake It)

Grezzo (Zelda graphical remakes, Miitopia)

Fairly close:

Mercury Steam (2D Metroid)

Platinum (Astral Chain, Bayonetta)

Eighting (Pikmin 4, Pikmin 3 Deluxe)

Omega Force (Warriors titles)

Ubisoft Milan (Mario+Rabbids)

Indieszero (Sushi Striker)

Arika (the Battle Royale games other than F-Zero, Nintendo 3D classics, Dr. Luigi)

Arzest (Hey Pikmin, Yoshi’s New Island)

Have worked together but not much:

Team Ninja (Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, Metroid Other M, more)

Kou Shibusawa (Fire Emblem Three Houses)

Artepiazza (Mario RPG Remake)

ILCA (Pokemon BDSP)

Tantalus (Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess remasters)

Brace Yourself (Zelda Crypt of Necromancer game)



This is somewhat subjective, but I don’t know how much people would disagree with it.

Let’s separate these devs into categories

Nintendo would buy if the dev wanted to be bought/publisher wanted to sell them: Game Freak, Creatures, HAL, Intelligent Systems, Namco Studio S.

All too close to Nintendo not to be purchased if they were looking to sell.

Nintendo would probably buy if the developer wanted to be bought: Good Feel, Grezzo, Camelot, Mercury Steam

All except Camelot have some non-Nintendo appeal to various groups, but they’re closer to Nintendo than anyone else.

Off the table: Platinum, ILCA, Tantalus

Khu says Game Freak really disliked ILCA’s work on BDSP so that probably kills the relationship and ILCA is already working closely with Namco. Tantalus was just bought by a VC… thing. Platinum appears to have taken on too many employees and seems in pretty severe danger and probably would only try to sell if they’re about to go bankrupt. As shown with Vanpool and Alpha Dream, Nintendo won’t save their partners if they’re dying.

Probably off the table: Team Ninja, Omega Force, Kou Shibusawa, Ubisoft Milan, Artepiazza

Outside of Artepiazza, these are all owned by major publishers who I doubt have interest in selling off their studios right now. Team Ninja and Omega Force and Kou Shibusawa is like… Most of KT’s significant output? Nintendo would probably have interest in all of these devs, but it’s not very likely they would be available for purchase. Nintendo would probably also be outbid for Team Ninja as well if they went up for sale as other publishers are a better fit. I don’t know if Nintendo has worked enough with Artepiazza to pull the trigger if they became available for sale either (I would assume that Square Enix would have more interest than Nintendo due to Artepiazza having a much closer relationship to Square historically).

Have no feel on if Nintendo would buy them if they were up for purchase: Eighting, indieszero, Brace Yourself, Arzest, Arika

So who will Nintendo buy? … I don’t know because I don’t know who is going to be for sale.

If any of the devs in the “Nintendo would definitely or probably buy” categories ask to be bought, I expect Nintendo to buy them. Every other dev seems a lot less likely to either be sold or for Nintendo to buy them if they come up for sale. People should probably ask for Nintendo to collaborate first with a dev before asking them to buy a dev.

In terms of publisher acquisitions, I don’t see Nintendo buying any major established game publisher. Sega, EA, and Ubisoft are the most likely game publishers to be sold, but Sega and EA are just abysmal fits for Nintendo and a Ubisoft purchase comes with just so many contracts and studios and licenses and problems that it’s hard to imagine anyone buying them. Sega seems like a much better fit for Sony or Netflix or Microsoft, while EA is a much better fit with Disney.

Nintendo would probably have interest in buying Square Enix or Capcom if they came up for sale, but those two companies will not be up for sale most likely and Sony is a much better fit for both companies business wise due to both companies relying so much on PC. Nintendo may have interest in Namco-Bandai, but I’m not sure the fit is great as most of their value is from licensed properties or Gundam toys.

The only publisher I could see Nintendo purchasing is Koei Tecmo due to how frequently Nintendo has hired various KT developers (Omega Force in particular, but not only them), but again, purchasing a publisher is a major pain and that will lead to many legal battles and redundancies (and KT doesn’t seem likely to want to be bought either). KT also has an fairly high market cap ($3.6B last I checked) and doesn’t have many IPs of their own Nintendo would seem too interested in. Nintendo would probably let Gust keep making Atelier, but that doesn’t really move the needle financially. Would Nintendo gain very much from having Ninja Gaiden or Nioh? ….Maybe? Would Dead or Alive continue with Nintendo? No.

Nintendo has interest in Fatal Frame, but it’s again not much of a needle mover. Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Nobunaga’s Ambition and Dynasty Warriors also seem unlikely to be continued if Nintendo purchased the publisher as Nintendo would likely have those devs focus on Fire Emblem and various Nintendo Warriors spinoffs. Nintendo would be spending more than $3.6B on a publisher just to get some dev studios they want. It seems really unlikely unless Nintendo is just really desperate to add a bunch of devs (and KT decides randomly to sell).

Overall, just don’t see a publisher acquisition and the list of devs they could buy is basically just devs that already near exclusively work for them.
 
It all stems from the naive thinking of "Sony and Microsoft are doing it, why isn't Nintendo?". They fail to realize that Nintendo didn't build their first party empire through acquisitions. They built it through carefully curating and nurturing internal game development talent over the course of several decades. Acquisitions just don't really make sense for Nintendo the same way they do for Sony and Microsoft.
 
MagiCarbo said:
It all stems from the naive thinking of "Sony and Microsoft are doing it, why isn't Nintendo?". They fail to realize that Nintendo didn't build their first party empire through acquisitions. They built it through carefully curating and nurturing internal game development talent over the course of several decades. Acquisitions just don't really make sense for Nintendo the same way they do for Sony and Microsoft.
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If anything, it's the other way around; Nintendo's competition are doing so, so they may need to be proactive or it can have serious consequences down the line. A lot of the reason for Microsoft to acquire studios like Activision and Bethesda is because they were previously big deals to Sony. Acting as if there's no way that the same will happen to Nintendo is a risky proposition, at best.

For instance, if one of Nintendo's competition were to significantly invest in Namco, either through outright acquisition, or enough of a controlling stake that their priorities shift significantly, Nintendo could find themselves having lost a key partner who helps them on several of their biggest franchises including Smash Bros and Mario kart, that would be extremely difficult to replace.

There's not really any benefit to consumers from any of these acquisitions, only negatives, but as a business they really should be planning for those eventualities. Doing so will be exactly why we've recently had Namco get specific studios recently for Nintendo projects, which Nintendo must have been bankrolling, even if they've not outright made an acquisition.
 
Linkstrikesback said:
If anything, it's the other way around; Nintendo's competition are doing so, so they may need to be proactive or it can have serious consequences down the line. A lot of the reason for Microsoft to acquire studios like Activision and Bethesda is because they were previously big deals to Sony. Acting as if there's no way that the same will happen to Nintendo is a risky proposition, at best.

For instance, if one of Nintendo's competition were to significantly invest in Namco, either through outright acquisition, or enough of a controlling stake that their priorities shift significantly, Nintendo could find themselves having lost a key partner who helps them on several of their biggest franchises including Smash Bros and Mario kart, that would be extremely difficult to replace.

There's not really any benefit to consumers from any of these acquisitions, only negatives, but as a business they really should be planning for those eventualities. Doing so will be exactly why we've recently had Namco get specific studios recently for Nintendo projects, which Nintendo must have been bankrolling, even if they've not outright made an acquisition.
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My major issue with defensive purchases is that it's really hard to find a publisher that Nintendo would value more than Sony due to Nintendo's unwillingness to publish on PC and because Sony relies more on third-party publishers and because Sony has more departments to absorb the non-gaming shit that would come attached to the publisher. Square and Nintendo both rely on Square Enix, but Sony would pay more because FF14 needs to be on PC to make most of its money. So Sony would just pay more for these publishers if they came up for purchase.

Koei Tecmo is pretty much the only one that Nintendo would value nearly as much as Sony.

A few specific studios Nintendo values more than Sony and Microsoft and I could see being bought as a defensive purchase.
 
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Nintendo prefers to do things the keiretsu way where companies are tightly knit but not under direct control. They also have some share holdings in the companies listed above (like Bandai Namco and Game Freak), usually as a way to cement the partnership. Many other Japanese companies like Toyota also behave similarly.
 


My boy Mr Jon Cartwright covered this in a lovely video last year if anyone wants to another (Very deep) voice on the matter
 
Yeah, I feel like some people don't realize that Nintendo bought Monolithsoft and Next Level Games because they were valuable to Nintendo and didn't want to loose them to a potential buyer that could force them not to develop for Nintendo (NLG being the recent one).

If TK or Namco were in the same situation than Nintendo may purchase but they aren't going to not buy a studio just to do it.
 
Meelow said:
Yeah, I feel like some people don't realize that Nintendo bought Monolithsoft and Next Level Games because they were valuable to Nintendo and didn't want to loose them to a potential buyer that could force them not to develop for Nintendo (NLG being the recent one).

If TK or Namco were in the same situation than Nintendo may purchase but they aren't going to not buy a studio just to do it.
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Both Monolithsoft and NLG were cases of their owners looking to sell and giving Nintendo first right of refusal. They weren't cases of Ninteneo looking to buy for the sake of buying or getting bigger.
 
Hailinel said:
Both Monolithsoft and NLG were cases of their owners looking to sell and giving Nintendo first right of refusal. They weren't cases of Ninteneo looking to buy for the sake of buying or getting bigger.
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That's what I am saying.
 
By the time Nintendo buys a studio it will be one that feels inseperable from Nintendo that people are surprised they were even seperate.

That probably makes the transition smoother than a lot of other buyouts.

Hailinel said:
Both Monolithsoft and NLG were cases of their owners looking to sell and giving Nintendo first right of refusal. They weren't cases of Ninteneo looking to buy for the sake of buying or getting bigger.
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I wonder to this day if these choices were inspired by the loss of Rare and the immediate cost this made to Nintendo's Gamecube output.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall to the talks about the loss of Rare.
 
Monolithsoft has already contributed 100x what rare did in just one RPG trilogy, let alone all the support Monolithsoft does for Nintendo's pillars.
 
Mer.Saloon said:
By the time Nintendo buys a studio it will be one that feels inseperable from Nintendo that people are surprised they were even seperate.

That probably makes the transition smoother than a lot of other buyouts.


I wonder to this day if these choices were inspired by the loss of Rare and the immediate cost this made to Nintendo's Gamecube output.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall to the talks about the loss of Rare.
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I don't think the decisions were at all linked. Their relationship with Rare was very much a partnership that produced a lot of titles in the '90s and that helped prop up the N64 in the west, but Monolith quickly grew into a key cobtributor not only with their original RPGs but the amount of support they've given other Nintendo projects.

I cannot imagine a reality where Rare devs willingly did support work on EAD/EPD games.
 
Rare was pretty substantial to keeping the N64 profitable in the West as well as extending the life of the SNES (in the US) during the rise of the PS1. So its not like they weren't pivotal in their own way. At most, the problem is that Rare was pretty seperate from Nintendo oversight which kept them from fully being embraced by Nintendo of Japan.

And where does NLG fit in this matter?
 
Hailinel said:
I don't think the decisions were at all linked. Their relationship with Rare was very much a partnership that produced a lot of titles in the '90s and that helped prop up the N64 in the west, but Monolith quickly grew into a key cobtributor not only with their original RPGs but the amount of support they've given other Nintendo projects.
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The art/asset support portion of Monolith is just a mirror of what several other companies have done and continue to do on the backend of modern Nintendo graphic work production. If anything, it was a way for Nintendo to leverage how to use a company of that size when realistically they were going to cap the amount of standalone Monolith projects.

Hailinel said:
I cannot imagine a reality where Rare devs willingly did support work on EAD/EPD games.
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The technology wasn't there at the time for those structures. But also, RARE was often fully working on 4-5 games and wouldn't have the resources to collaborate with Japan anyway. But if RARE was a Nintendo subsidiary now, they probably would be not much different than how every other Nintendo subsidiary works. (Work on 1..maybe 2 games.. and help on others).
 
Mer.Saloon said:
I'd love to be a fly on the wall to the talks about the loss of Rare.
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Nintendo: “Microsoft wants to offer how much for our share of Rare?”

Well it’s a shame to lose Banjo, but $183M helps with that loss.

Let’s go buy Retro from the owner who has a few issues and is looking to sell for $1M.”
 
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I'd just like to see them be more aggressive with expanding EPD. There are so many series that could have good selling games but don't have the manpower to make them internally at Nintendo.
 
Mekanos said:
I'd just like to see them be more aggressive with expanding EPD. There are so many series that could have good selling games but don't have the manpower to make them internally at Nintendo.
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Their expansion of their development headquarters is leading to precisely that, isn't it?
 
Mer.Saloon said:
Rare was pretty substantial to keeping the N64 profitable in the West as well as extending the life of the SNES (in the US) during the rise of the PS1. So its not like they weren't pivotal in their own way. At most, the problem is that Rare was pretty seperate from Nintendo oversight which kept them from fully being embraced by Nintendo of Japan.

And where does NLG fit in this matter?
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NLG is a key software development studio for Nintendo at this time that they were able to acquire for a non-exorbitant price & seemingly gets along well w/Nintendo who they did not want to lose due in the current era of game development we are in.
 
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It’s just not nintendo’s thing. Especially a big name. If they do it will be a smaller company that just helps out with development. Nothing major where they would allow them to make original ips.
 
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Zeal543 said:
I feel nintendo's acquisitions are too "random" (for lack of a better term) to make predictions on, although I suppose that depends on how you arbitrarily define "major".
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The list of purchases is too small to be definitive about their strategy, but I feel like most of the points made in the OP (buying a publisher is a huge pain in the ass that would cause Nintendo to get a ton of shit they don't want, other publishers would value some devs or publishers that came up for sale more than Nintendo, etc) are reasonable regardless of Nintendo's history of purchases.
 
ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
The list of purchases is too small to be definitive about their strategy, but I feel like most of the points made in the OP (buying a publisher is a huge pain in the ass that would cause Nintendo to get a ton of shit they don't want, other publishers would value some devs or publishers that came up for sale more than Nintendo, etc) are reasonable regardless of Nintendo's history of purchases.
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Oh yeah I think publishers are off the table
 
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The two simplest reasons we won't see Nintendo buying other development houses are:

1. They generally do not do acquisitions as a way to grow.

2. They are investing heavily in their own internal growth with a ton of hiring to be done for the brand new development center they are building.
 
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ItWasMeantToBe19 said:
Just wanted to add my (somewhat long) thoughts about this in thread form as this discourse is pretty frequent and frustrating.


1. Buying a publisher is generally not good for consumers, but it also can be bad for the publishers doing the purchase themselves.

Microsoft has bought publishers because they're desperate for IP and devs, but it adds a massive amount of redundancies that make it hard to swallow if you're not very desperate.

You end up adding


Another localization department
Another overseas publishing department
Another marketing department
Another QA department
Another customer service department
Another indie relations department


And so on and so forth.

You probably need more people in these departments after you expand… But not as many as you absorb from buying another publisher.

What happens a lot of time following consolidation like this is layoffs and the closure of the redundant department, which are both bad in general and actually pretty expensive for the business doing the purchase. Nintendo seems to try to avoid doing layoffs so if they buy a publisher, they’ll end up just paying a ton of people to do things that… They already have other people doing…


2. Other gaming publishers have diversified and licensed so much that their purchase would lead to significant headaches for Nintendo.

Let’s look at the most discussed potential gaming purchase for Nintendo, Sega. If Nintendo buys Sega, they are inheriting:


Total War and its developer
Football Manager and its developer
Phantasy Star Online 2 and its developer
Angry Birds and its developer
Two Point Campus/Hospital and its developer
Relic (an RTS studio)
Amplitude (a studio that makes Civ-like titles)
Other mobile devs


These games… CAN transition over to console… But that’s not where their audience is.

Mobile games like Angry Birds may be OK for Nintendo to publish, but I’m very uncertain if Nintendo would want to publish PC games at all. It would start constant rumors about if Nintendo would follow the lead of Microsoft and Sony of publishing other first-party games on PC. Nintendo could create a separate publishing label for PC games, but this would also be a pain. They could try to sell off parts of the publisher they bought that they don’t want, but this could be even harder.

Let’s look at the publisher that most desperately wants to be bought, EA. If Nintendo buys EA, they now have to deal with licensing deals for FC, the NFL, college football, Star Wars (four separate Star Wars sub-franchises at a minimum!), Iron Man, Black Panther, UFC, and so on and so forth. They will be losing a huge chunk of revenue to Disney and other partners for their upcoming games, may have to keep many games multiplatform (Madden in particular), and have to deal with many other contract headaches. Namco offers similar issues with their anime licensing.

Other publishers have a lot of non-gaming stuff Nintendo would have no interest in. If Konami is purchased by Nintendo, Nintendo can now own a bunch of gyms and gambling machines and a bunch of other random non-gaming stuff….. I don’t know if they want more (or any?) of these?


3. You can want to buy a developer or publisher, but they have to want to be bought.

I mean, you can do a hostile takeover of some publicly traded company but… That’s a really bad idea as then the devs could just leave.

And many devs aren’t publicly traded and many publishers have family ownership.


4. Nintendo has generally bought devs they have a relationship with.

Nintendo’s recent purchases were of Nintendo Pictures, Next Level Games, and SRD. Nintendo Pictures (formerly Dynamo Pictures) was not that close with Nintendo (having worked on only Other M and some Pikmin shorts for Nintendo IIRC), but SRD had been a Nintendo partner since… Literally the early 1980s and Next Level Games had been working exclusively with Nintendo for many years prior to their purchase. It’s possible Nintendo could buy a developer that they have very little working experience with, but I would assume they would not and I feel this assumption is fairly reasonable (if Nintendo was interested in buying someone, they would probably have them work on something first imo). With this assumption in mind, let’s look at some of their partners.



Extremely close

Game Freak (Pokemon)

Creatures (Pokemon)

HAL (Kirby)

Intelligent Systems (Fire Emblem, Paper Mario, and WarioWare)

Camelot (Mario Sports, Golden Sun)

Very close

Namco Studio S and associated technology team (Smash Bros, Mario Sports, and Mario Kart)

Good Feel (recent Yoshi titles, Kirby Epic Yarn, Wario Land Shake It)

Grezzo (Zelda graphical remakes, Miitopia)

Fairly close:

Mercury Steam (2D Metroid)

Platinum (Astral Chain, Bayonetta)

Eighting (Pikmin 4, Pikmin 3 Deluxe)

Omega Force (Warriors titles)

Ubisoft Milan (Mario+Rabbids)

Indieszero (Sushi Striker)

Arika (the Battle Royale games other than F-Zero, Nintendo 3D classics, Dr. Luigi)

Arzest (Hey Pikmin, Yoshi’s New Island)

Have worked together but not much:

Team Ninja (Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, Metroid Other M, more)

Kou Shibusawa (Fire Emblem Three Houses)

Artepiazza (Mario RPG Remake)

ILCA (Pokemon BDSP)

Tantalus (Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess remasters)

Brace Yourself (Zelda Crypt of Necromancer game)



This is somewhat subjective, but I don’t know how much people would disagree with it.

Let’s separate these devs into categories

Nintendo would buy if the dev wanted to be bought/publisher wanted to sell them: Game Freak, Creatures, HAL, Intelligent Systems, Namco Studio S.

All too close to Nintendo not to be purchased if they were looking to sell.

Nintendo would probably buy if the developer wanted to be bought: Good Feel, Grezzo, Camelot, Mercury Steam

All except Camelot have some non-Nintendo appeal to various groups, but they’re closer to Nintendo than anyone else.

Off the table: Platinum, ILCA, Tantalus

Khu says Game Freak really disliked ILCA’s work on BDSP so that probably kills the relationship and ILCA is already working closely with Namco. Tantalus was just bought by a VC… thing. Platinum appears to have taken on too many employees and seems in pretty severe danger and probably would only try to sell if they’re about to go bankrupt. As shown with Vanpool and Alpha Dream, Nintendo won’t save their partners if they’re dying.

Probably off the table: Team Ninja, Omega Force, Kou Shibusawa, Ubisoft Milan, Artepiazza

Outside of Artepiazza, these are all owned by major publishers who I doubt have interest in selling off their studios right now. Team Ninja and Omega Force and Kou Shibusawa is like… Most of KT’s significant output? Nintendo would probably have interest in all of these devs, but it’s not very likely they would be available for purchase. Nintendo would probably also be outbid for Team Ninja as well if they went up for sale as other publishers are a better fit. I don’t know if Nintendo has worked enough with Artepiazza to pull the trigger if they became available for sale either (I would assume that Square Enix would have more interest than Nintendo due to Artepiazza having a much closer relationship to Square historically).

Have no feel on if Nintendo would buy them if they were up for purchase: Eighting, indieszero, Brace Yourself, Arzest, Arika

So who will Nintendo buy? … I don’t know because I don’t know who is going to be for sale.

If any of the devs in the “Nintendo would definitely or probably buy” categories ask to be bought, I expect Nintendo to buy them. Every other dev seems a lot less likely to either be sold or for Nintendo to buy them if they come up for sale. People should probably ask for Nintendo to collaborate first with a dev before asking them to buy a dev.

In terms of publisher acquisitions, I don’t see Nintendo buying any major established game publisher. Sega, EA, and Ubisoft are the most likely game publishers to be sold, but Sega and EA are just abysmal fits for Nintendo and a Ubisoft purchase comes with just so many contracts and studios and licenses and problems that it’s hard to imagine anyone buying them. Sega seems like a much better fit for Sony or Netflix or Microsoft, while EA is a much better fit with Disney.

Nintendo would probably have interest in buying Square Enix or Capcom if they came up for sale, but those two companies will not be up for sale most likely and Sony is a much better fit for both companies business wise due to both companies relying so much on PC. Nintendo may have interest in Namco-Bandai, but I’m not sure the fit is great as most of their value is from licensed properties or Gundam toys.

The only publisher I could see Nintendo purchasing is Koei Tecmo due to how frequently Nintendo has hired various KT developers (Omega Force in particular, but not only them), but again, purchasing a publisher is a major pain and that will lead to many legal battles and redundancies (and KT doesn’t seem likely to want to be bought either). KT also has an fairly high market cap ($3.6B last I checked) and doesn’t have many IPs of their own Nintendo would seem too interested in. Nintendo would probably let Gust keep making Atelier, but that doesn’t really move the needle financially. Would Nintendo gain very much from having Ninja Gaiden or Nioh? ….Maybe? Would Dead or Alive continue with Nintendo? No.

Nintendo has interest in Fatal Frame, but it’s again not much of a needle mover. Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Nobunaga’s Ambition and Dynasty Warriors also seem unlikely to be continued if Nintendo purchased the publisher as Nintendo would likely have those devs focus on Fire Emblem and various Nintendo Warriors spinoffs. Nintendo would be spending more than $3.6B on a publisher just to get some dev studios they want. It seems really unlikely unless Nintendo is just really desperate to add a bunch of devs (and KT decides randomly to sell).

Overall, just don’t see a publisher acquisition and the list of devs they could buy is basically just devs that already near exclusively work for them.
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Don't you think acquiring sonic would be worth it it went to so burger company instead
 
bigbigboy said:
Don't you think acquiring sonic would be worth it it went to so burger company instead
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images
 
jirou said:
Acquiring Sonic (the Fast Food chain) would be worth it for Nintendo.

is what I think they mean
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I think they think that the fast food chain owns some stake in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. That's how I interpret the "it went to so[me] burger company instead" part.
 
I wouldn't rule anything out, but with Nintendo investing big in internal studio expansions they may find themselves in a situaiton where they have enough talent to service all their internal IPs making acquisition purely defensive or opportunistic, like NLG owners deciding to sell.

That said, the predatory acquistion/strip mine/close studio tactics of the western AAA model may force Nintendo's hand, but i agree they prefer working with close partners

Because you can buy a studio and IP but never the talent. And IP devalues quickly if the games bomb.
 
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In the Japanese market, Nintendo really has no need to outright buy any other publisher, because of the following combination:

-Nintendo already have the pick of Japanese industry talent
-Their market position makes it so that other Japanese publishers' intellectual property will be devalued if it isn't present on the hardware with the vast majority of market share (Nintendo's). Japanese product managers will not be able to ignore Nintendo's market position for another generation without executives seriously questioning the decisions the leadership at Sega/Square/Namco/Koei-Tecmo etc have taken, that have left hundreds of thousands of sales off the table due to little more than managers' fond memories of the PS1/2
-Nintendo is largely uninterested in the intellectual property of others, given that they are happy to either attach their existing intellectual property to a game concept or simply create new ones from scratch. Their recent track record with something like Splatoon bears this out - their competitors in the domestic market have no rival for this relatively new IP that started on a failed console sales-wise

I would therefore expect more collaborations between Nintendo and those they have had good relationships with from Switch 1 (i.e. more Warriors games and K-T/Namco co-productions). I would also expect many more Japanese games developed with Switch 2 as the base platform - if this doesn't happen, things will be more up in the air and a major Japanese 3rd party publisher could experience serious failure. Even in that scenario I'm not sure Nintendo would be involved in an acquisition and may just absorb the fleeing talent.

The West holds even less interest - we're observing in real-time what happens when the AAA industry devolves into horse-trading of intellectual property combined with mass layoffs of those who actually make said property. An era of mass layoffs and imploding intellectual property provides abundant opportunities for Nintendo to hire into their existing Western studios or perhaps create new operations from scratch - but there is absolutely no business case to make acquisitions of IP that has already been heavily devalued.

As well as expansion of their Western studios, I would expect to see more collaborations between Nintendo and the largest Western independent studios, similar to their work on Cadence of Hyrule and Advance Wars ReBoot Camp.
 
What is with the food themed bumps lately? First the Eggs benedict, now Sonic. This forum attracting recipe bots or something?
 
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