This is both interesting and terrifying at the same time. I’m not much of a Nintendo fan these days, but I don’t think Microsoft would really help things if they acquired them. But I also doubt Nintendo would sell… Can they be taken over hostilely (acquire them through buying a controlling number of shares)? I am not sure how that shit works if the companies are in totally different countries, even if both are publicly traded.
Microsoft were monopoly seeking/abusing pricks in the 80s/90s/00s but I had just about started to accept that maybe they had changed. Accepting open source and open standards, and competing on their merits in the gaming world.
I was wrong. They’re not as powerful as they were 20 years ago but, having seen this email, their tactics seem unchanged.
Very telling that he wanted to do it because it seemed like a good career move personally first, as opposed to something that would somehow be a good match.
Let me preface this by saying I would not be in favor of this acquisition, even though Nintendo are a bunch of overly litigious pricks that abuse the copyright system in the name of profits and treat their partners with open hostility and their eShop is a shovelware shitfest running on hardware that was already antique by the time it launched. But I really don’t see how this is anything more than Phil Spencer being a bit too transparent. Jim Ryan and Sony would jump at the chance to acquire Nintendo just as eagerly. Both PS and Xbox have been aggressively pursuing acquisitions and consolidation for years now, and Nintendo would be a crown jewel in any gaming publisher’s portfolio.
Micrsoft’s gaming head honchos were talking about making a monopoly. And it’s clearly the goal. They don’t care about gamers or games just hurting Sony (they said their main goal was to kill Playstation). The ActiBlizz acquire showed them they can buy anyone. Monopolies of any kind are bad, and this would be horrible.
There is no such thing as a company that cares about the product they make or the people who buy their product. The purpose of every company is solely to make money. The product itself is, to some degree, arbitrary. The only reason Microsoft even makes video games is because it’s adjacent, and in some ways a natural extension of, their original business.
This is especially true of publicly traded companies.
A publicly traded company's customers are it's investors, and it's product is shareholder value. Everything else they do is just the manufacturing process.
Nintendo does care about making good games, or it wouldn't make all the weird moves that it does, and it wouldn't consistently output quality titles like it does. We are just so used to dispassionate money leeches controlling everything that the idea that anyone in charge cares about anything but money seems hard to believe.
Which is all the more reason why Microsoft can't be allowed to acquire it.
This is too broad of a brushstroke. Is there any megacorporation that cares about its customers? Doubt it. But are plenty of small studios that clearly value the quality of their product.
Yes I know. But I wanted to make a general statement instead of typing out all the realities of corporations in our end stage capitalist hellscape. Typing on my phone is hard lol
Yeah, Nintendo have enough funds to just sit there and do nothing for decades. We also have seen plenty that they chose to go their own way instead of chasing whatever is popular right now for a quick buck.
As long as they have leaders following the Nintendo philosophy, they're just going to truck on, at their own pace for better and worse.
They implement measures to make it very difficult for a single shareholder to gain a majority stake in the company. It’s called a poison pill because it will fuck over every shareholder. Like when a company creates new shares but never put those on sale and thus dilute the shares of all shareholders. Of course the company can only do that if the shareholders voted for such a policy.
Basically the company board has approved a policy where the company will issue new shares if one owner reaches a certain percentage of current shares. Those shares can be then purchased by the existing shareholders (excluding the one(s) that already owns more than the percentage) with a discount.
So Nintendo could have such a policy in place that if one shareholder goes over 20%, new shares will be issued to other shareholders, lowering the value of each share, and effectively also the relative amount of shares (percentage) owned by that one shareholder. That basically leaves only one option, the buyer attempting the takeover would have to negotiate with the board directly. And in the case of Microsoft, the board would laugh at their face.
Maybe they could achieve the takeover via shell shareholders remaining under the percentage each, and get them to vote in a new board that would revoke the policy, but that’s way more difficult to pull off.
Many companies in Japan have keiretsu style cross shareholding,
vertical keiretsu: with manufacturing industry largely comprises of parent company holding shares of their suppliers, distributors, etc, and in return those suppliers / distributors / sub companies hold some amount of shares of the parent company. These sort of shield them from market fluctuations.
horizontal keiretsu: when the relationships between companies are more horizontally sliced, e.g. you often see Mitsubishi UFJ, Mitsubishi Electronics, Mitsubishi Materials, etc.
These cross shareholding systems create a resistance towards hostile takeover, which have both its up and down sides, but at least it has resisted the likes of corporate raiders, e.g. Carl Icahn, where they acquire companies for asset stripping. Corporate raiders don’t create values for society, it’s to fatten payouts.
Sorry for the long reply, it’s just for other users to get a glimpse on why hostile takeover is extremely rare in Japan, and probably doubly so when it comes to foreign hostile takeover.
Nintendo is successful because of their games, not because their hardware is the best
I agree, their first party games are usually extremely polished and accessible for everyone in the family. their concepts overall for consoles are typically really good though. just about every console since the Wii (except WiiU) has felt great to use, even if they all have some kind of gimmick. But I think the gimmicks help in their favor, it makes them stand out from PS and Xbox
I still think the N64’s overall technical superiority over the PS1 is very visible. Notice how much more closed in most PS1 games’ environments are. Spyro is the main exception, but that needed a lot of special tricks where N64 just does that. I say this as someone who doesn’t really like the N64 library.
Yeah, many games originally planned for n64 got scrapped due to cartridge format. FF7 is a notable example. All that processing power gone to waste because space constraint. They learned nothing of this and still used the alien mini dvd format in Gamecube.
If that hardware was the first handheld gaming device capable of playing some small selection of 3D current gen games? It absolutely would have been successful.
Being Nintendo didn't make the Wii U successful, because it was the worst piece of shit anyone's ever made. The switch was successful because it was a good handheld.
Nah, the Wii U wasn’t a bad system at all. It failed for lack of advertising and game support. There was nothing to play and people didn’t understand it wasn’t just a Wii accessory. The name certainly didn’t help either.
I agree. The Wii U was great fun. The second screen was great for off-TV play and for local multiplayer.
Not only was it terribly marketed, but Nintendo had trouble getting the 3DS to sell and put all their energy into saving that. This left the Wii U with a lack of games at launch.
Combine that with EA dropping Nintendo because they refused to adopt Origin as their online platform, and it was doomed from the start, whether the hardware was good or not.
Edit: and the gamepad was more comfortable to hold than the Switch, ironically.
I mean that the nvidia shield tablet, which was released 3 years earlier, had almost exactly the same cpu/gpu of the nintendo switch for $100 cheaper, but it was a flop.
the secret it’s in making a console that It’s not able to run real current gen games (even in 2017), but it’s able to run highly optimized games that look like current gen (especially 1st party games where they don’t aim for visual realism)
i think for pure raw power the wiiu had a stronger cpu than the switch, but then the software didn’t take advantage of
You can't compare a console to an Android tablet. They didn't give developers any reason to target the shield tablet; of course there weren't going to be any games. And the built in controllers to make it a handheld were what made the switch the switch anyways.
Switch games never at any point looked current gen. They could support some games with current gen mechanics, in a handheld form factor. The switch had no path to success if it wasn't a handheld. There are some people who only use it docked, but nowhere near enough that it was remotely possible to build enough momentum for third party support.
Microsoft has their own strengths. If they had made the Switch, there would have been less compelling first party games, but there would have been a lot more early third party buy in and it would have been a wash. Ultimately the fact that it was a viable handheld capable of some meaningful 3D worlds would have sold it.
Switch games never at any point looked current gen. They could support some games with current gen mechanics, in a handheld form factor.
What are you talking about? One of the first games they brought out on the system was Doom 2016, a VERY good looking game at the time. The fact that a handheld could run it was mind-blowing, even at half the framerate.
Doom looked awful on the switch. It took an extremely heavy dose of adaptive resolution, with a bunch of effects rendered at 360p, and heavy motion blur just to get the game to function at 30FPS.
And it's a game that uses very careful design to run extremely well on very old PC hardware.
Microsoft is a good underdog because they have infinite money. And a really bad market leader, I bet worse than Sony. It would've been way better for the industry to not let them acquire the big boys they have.
Microsoft is not only a bad market leader.
It is a bad loser too. Remember the Nokia purchase? They sunk billions into the company too boost their worse mobile OS, and when it failed they shut down the whole company.
Imagine they would to something similar to Nintendo.
Hmmm, I’m definitely not an expert in the gaming industry, but I’m struggling to see how it could be good for consumers. It’s probably good, when Sony or Microsoft buy small studios and let them produce projects they wouldn’t produce otherwise. But Nintendo is not a small studio that’s struggling to survive.
Also, less innovation. Nintendo, for better or worse, always does its own thing. Sometimes that turns out bad, but often it turns out interesting at least and amazing at best. PS and Xbox do mostly the same thing with small gimmicks that are sometimes just dropped (kinnect 2). Nintendo goes all out with stuff that nobody else does. Like the combined portable and home console, handheld with 3D, a console with a giant board controller, a console with nunchucks as controllers. It goes outside of the box boldly and people rightfully love it for it, even if their hardware is most of the times weaker than the other console makers.
I can't imagine that Xbox or Playstation would want to get rid of the business rival that deliberately not competes with them on the same level.
It’s good in the sense that Nintendo is sitting on a lot of old games and rather terrible at republishing them. Nintendo Switch still has no VirtualConsole support from what I understand, which is absolutely ridiculous. I’d expect Microsoft to address that. It would also mean Nintendo games becoming multiplatform, which would also be a welcome change.
The downside of course is that Nintendo is rather special in the gaming world. They are still doing a lot of quirky, innovative and family friendly stuff like it’s the 90s. That’ll be lost sooner or later when absorbed into Microsoft.
It seems like it there might be a number of updates about the FTC leak, but the notable highlights of this email from me are the plotted purchases of Nintendo and WB Games.
The way they discuss the purchase of Nintendo as if it is an inevitability and how they may need to purchase it in a hostile manner really cements to me that they are utilizing Microsoft’s immense capital to obtain a gaming monopoly.
I know it is an unpopular position because of how beloved a Gamepass is, but this really solidifies how shady Xbox/ Microsoft is; and I really hope the acquisition of ActiBlizz is blocked.
Why wouldn’t it happen for Game Pass? It’s happened for every new service. Start them with a great deal to undermine all competition because you can eat the cost and they can’t. When the competition dies, slowly start enshittifying it, until it’s as bad or worse than the original. Arguably Microsoft is already starting that process by killing off the $1 demo.
Microsoft isn’t going to pass up free money, and if anything this email conversation confirms that they’re drooling, waiting for the “fuck them over the barrel” stage.
It's not happening for Game Pass because they're not in a position of strength to exploit. Nintendo is. Unity thought they were. Streaming video services all raised prices, and plenty of them are still offering value to customers at those prices, but I know that I cancelled two of mine in response; and streaming video services have at least four major players, which is more competition than the business they replaced (cable) ever saw. The $1 trial was always a teaser rate to show people the value they can get out of Game Pass. It's not for me, but the numbers make a lot of sense for a lot of people. Contrast that to Nintendo, who is in a position of strength, only offers their retro games for a subscription on their shitty hardware on their shitty emulators and sues everyone for offering them by other means, and I know which one I dislike more.
It’s not happening for Game Pass right now. If Microsoft hoovered up Nintendo and all the other companies, leaving Game Pass with little competition, they’d flip in an instant. Then you’d have not only Nintendo games for an overpriced subscription, you’d have Nintendo and everything else Microsoft bought for an overpriced subscription, where Microsoft can do whatever they want because only they have the rights to those games.
I’m not arguing Nintendo’s subscription services doesn’t suck ass, I’m arguing that Microsoft would do the same thing if they got their mits on Nintendo’s catalog, except potentially worse because they have more ‘exclusive content’ to lock-away in their garden and they can force their BS into Windows.
If Microsoft hoovered up Nintendo and all the other companies, leaving Game Pass with little competition, they’d flip in an instant.
And if I had $100B, I'd buy Nintendo, but Microsoft can't buy out that much of the video game market either, especially after Activision got through by the skin of their teeth. Activision happened because Nintendo didn't.
Nintendo is bad for game ownership right now. Live service games like Diablo IV are bad for game ownership right now. I don't care what Game Pass might be one day. The second it becomes that, you can guarantee I'll turn on it.
...potentially worse because they have more ‘exclusive content’ to lock-away in their garden and they can force their BS into Windows.
I'm a Linux guy. I was fearful of this for a long time, but it didn't take, and Microsoft clearly abandoned that strategy of trying to make the Windows Store happen for games. Even Microsoft couldn't force you to give them a larger cut of the PC gaming pie. Right now, they're struggling to increase Game Pass numbers beyond their ~30M subscribers even after they've added numerous publishers and developers to their catalogue in perpetuity, because, to my surprise, people can do math. The ones that the math works out for is probably not much larger than that 30M.
Sony is in a dominant position in the market. Xbox doesn't threaten them hardly at all. Even Sony isn't keeping games entirely exclusive anymore, probably because enough people like me did the math and found out that 4 exclusive games isn't worth having a $500 machine collect dust next to our TVs, so now their games get PC ports. These business models only turn to shit if you let them. We can live without all of them, so they're all optional. Don't give them money when they offer a bad product, and we'll only get better products.
The all digital design would certainly prevent me from buying an updated model, which is unfortunate since I do appreciate the backwards compatibility.
It’s a cynical move to get all game purchases done through their storefront and eliminate game reselling, and it will lock out a lot of price-conscious consumers who need to wait for a good sale, or buy used games.
On top of that, it’s a huge blow towards game preservation, since the logical next step would be to stop producing physical games. Even other publishers might think twice before producing a physical game if only a third of the base can even use disks.
Often people bring up that games can ship incomplete and need updates; but even a non-updated game is still more playable than a digital one when the servers aren’t maintained, and there’s no reason to remove the disk drive. You can still play digital games on a console with a disk drive.
All in all, this is a pretty disappointing update for me.
As someone who more and more appreciates having physical discs of media I agree with what you’re saying. We’re seeing not just games but media disappear because they’re digital only.
Digital is super convenient, but it also means you don’t own anything. I’ve still got N64 and Gamecube games and I can play them today. But when specific servers go away I’m out my games from the PS4, PC, etc. Even the few I have discs for. It’s such a bad feeling. Wish more games would launch without needing to be online all the time, especially for single player games. Seeing the depreciation of disc drives makes me sad.
even a non-updated game is still more playable than a digital one when the servers aren’t maintained
Or if your account is banned. We’ve heard many stories about accounts being banned by mistake or after a successful hacking attempt. And it’s not that simple to unban yourself, sometimes only media attention helps, which is not that easy to get.
Short of legislation that requires these machines to allow you to hook into alternate digital storefronts, or a requirement for even console purchases to be DRM free, I don't think consoles will ever have a bright future for preservation regardless of a disc drive.
I fully agree that game preservation is not a priority for any gaming company. The playability of old games and not requiring paying again for a remaster/ release can only hurt their bottom line.
The good thing is that they don’t have to like preservation, or even support it, when there’s physical game disks. In 40 years if I have a copy of Breath of the Wild and a working Switch, I can still play it; but the same likely cannot be said of a digital copy.
The fact that companies care so little for (or actively dislike) game preservation is the very reason physical games are so important.
No, I'd say that's why you want DRM-free games. Plenty of games don't even get physical releases because the economics don't make sense, and then they get crucial patches that fix game-breaking bugs. Your console will break over a long enough timeline, and eventually the parts to fix it won't be produced anymore; I doubt your Switch will still play Breath of the Wild 40 years from now. Basically the only way to preserve modern games that makes sense to me is to make them run on PC, DRM-free.
The playability of old games and not requiring paying again for a remaster/ release can only hurt their bottom line.
Nah, because making that remaster or re-release costs them money and is more of a gamble than just putting out the old version for cheaper. Most of GOG's business is built around this, and then you see things like Sega putting out a huge collection of their ROMs entirely DRM-free with ROM hacks built into the Steam workshop.
Do any recent games have their full data on the disc anymore? I figured they had become too big, and that the disc merely serves as a licence to download it online anyway.
My understanding is that most games come with the full game data on the disk, though it’s a little more of a gamble if some will be left as a download on the Switch carts since they charge by cart size if I recall correctly.
Having said that, it would still be the unpatched game data; but that’s still more playable than a digital copy when the servers are no longer maintained.
It’s also worth noting people with bad internet speeds can prefer the disks since copying 50-150GB is a lot faster than downloading it from the internet for them.
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