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Microsoft Nintendo acquisition hopes revealed by leaked Xbox exec email
- Ekaros 3y agoI would love to the Nintendo games on PC. So I'm all for this.
- GaggiX 3y agoWell you can emulate them. There is an emulator for each Nintendo console.
- _jplc 3y agoHow reasonable or delusional really are all these private ramblings? Because it looks like they would buy half the world if they let them do so.
- goosedragons 3y agoIt would have seemed sort of reasonable in 2013 where the Wii U was clearly struggling and the 3DS was barely gaining decent traction but still lagged against the DS. In late 2020 it just seems sort of insane when the Switch had already beat the lifetime sales the Xbox One in 3 years and brushing up against 360 numbers, Animal Crossing had a launch bigger than Halo 3 IIRC and Mario Kart 8 was still trucking along regularly in the sales chart despite already being over a half decade on.
- sirwhinesalot 3y agoLet us hope this never happens. MS culture would destroy Nintendo in short notice.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoDon't worry, Nintendo is pretty skilled at destroying itself the way it treats its fans, by suing them.
- aurareturn 3y agoI have a feeling that Nintendo gaming would outlast Xbox gaming.
- adubkov 3y agoThis.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoBecause Microsoft is smart thinking long term and doesn't care about an outdated model of selling consoles anymore, as it sees the future revenues comes from owning valuable IP and monetizing that instead on all the gaming platforms, regardless on which hardware you use to paly it: Xbox, PS5, Switch, Steam, iOS, Android, Linux, MacOS, tablets, smart-TVs, etc., they don't care, they'll gladly take your money regardless if you have an Xbox or not. They're slowly dethatching themselves from the console HW and moving to selling services the same way the detached from Windows and Office as the core products and made more money selling O365 and Azure subscriptions including their arch nemesis Linux. That's why they keep selling CoD to the competitor's Sony PlayStation instead of making it an Xbox excusive like Sony and fans feared they would. People, and Sony, still don't get it, that Microsft's new business model is monetizing IPs and services, not selling more console HW thanks to exclusives like the old days. They'll probably make more money form Candy Crush than Sony makes from Last of us on PlayStation. Holding on to the "console war" ("muh console sold more than your console!") is just silly and outdated. The big money is now gonna be in IP and services, not selling console HW, and Apple also knows this which is why it focuses more on new services for existing customers (ApleTV, credit cards, SOS satelite, etc) and less on selling more iPhones to new customers as the hardware market is already saturated. Nintendo will outlast the Xbox, but Microsoft will outlast Nintendo.
- manderley 3y agoSeems Nintendo IP is way more valuable than what Microsoft owns (and has, by and large, mismanaged)
- personalityson 3y agoWhat culture? Microsoft makes great games
- asutekku 3y agoWhat games?
- Klaster_1 3y agoLike Starfield, for example. Or the recent Quake 2 remaster. Microsoft owns Bethesda, Obsidian, id and plenty of other big name studios.
- ahoka 3y agoI haven’t tried it, but according to reviews Starfield seems like a generic space soap opera version of No Man’s Sky with loading screens.
- tetris11 3y ago> Microsoft owns Bethesda This... explains a lot. The user-hostile experience, the lack of innovation of their game engine, the ability to buy fantastic reviews. I never knew the two were connected.
- ffgjgf1 3y agoThey began making Starfield years before MS bought Zenimax
- theclansman 3y agoThey already tried to buy Nintendo in the early 2000s and got laughed at.
- prmoustache 3y agoPlease no.
- boffinAudio 3y agoFor me the key point in this discussion is the phrase "consumer relevance" .. Microsoft seem to be aware that they are becoming less and less relevant, and making big buys in the gaming industry seems to be a very unique means by which they can maintain their hegemony. Lets hope this doesn't happen. Microsofts' aggressive business practices and its classist culture are really undeserving of future childrens' devoted eyeballs ..
- jmkd 3y agoYou only need to look at the culture clash of Microsft and Rare to see what a bad idea this would be, "Microsoft purchased the developer in 2002, and the Stampers departed in 2007. The family atmosphere of the 90s, when Chris and Tim sat in on interviews and left their talented developers to work unhindered, offering occasional golden nuggets of advice, was long gone. “Microsoft and Rare was a bad marriage from the beginning,” Rare’s Martin Hollis told Eurogamer in 2012. “The groom was rich. The bride was beautiful. But they wanted to make different games, and they wanted to make them in different ways.”[0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/aug/07/ultimate-rare-40-years-british-videogames-jet-pac-goldeneye-sea-of-thieves https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/aug/07/ultimate-rare-...
- baby 3y agoacquisitions are always hard
- jmkd 3y agoCulture fit - while a prominent factor in job interview assessment - seems frequently relegated in acquisition processes.
- malermeister 3y agoIt's also what happened to Slack. It's culture was completely killed by the Salesforce acquisition and the old employees they have left are all disgruntled.
- highwaylights 3y agoThis was rather well done. Kudos.
- LoveMortuus 3y agoI would actually welcome Microsoft's acquisition of Nintendo. Purely because I have hope that perhaps Microsoft could stop Nintendo from behaving as evil as they do. DMCA claiming videos that don't contain any IP from Nintendo. If you mention Nintendo and emulation in the same day, you get a letter from Nintendo. Also shutting down game stores on previous hardware. Sometimes it really does just feel like Nintendo doesn't like its customers. Don't get me wrong, I (and my family) own a GameBoy, GameBoy Colour, DS, DSi, brother has a Switch and he's happy with it. While I carry DSi with me with Tetris which I love. But I dream of a brighter day. It's really quite sad.
- nextlevelwizard 3y agoNintendo more evil than Microsoft. What the fuck are you talking about? As if couple DMCAs are even a blip in the ocean that is Microsoft's evilness.
- LoveMortuus 3y agoI meant from a point of view of a normal person. At least that has been my experience. Microsoft hasn't done anything that made me angry enough to remember in quite a while, multiple years. The last thing that's on my mind that Microsoft did that was negatively received was Windows 8 and that was quite a while ago. Could just be my ignorance. But I did submit the original comment knowing that it'll get downvoted to oblivion, so it's okay. I still welcome Microsoft's acquisition of Nintendo.
- danaris 3y agoThat is because Nintendo's evilness is a drop of squid ink that can be easily seen before it dissipates into the vastness of the water. Microsoft's evilness is the ocean that you swim in. You do not see it because it just looks like The Way Things Have Always Been to you. The entire PC ecosystem—indeed, the entire tech world—is worse because of Microsoft's monopolistic behavior in the 1990s. We are still stuck with, at best, a desktop platform triopoly (is that a word?), and the big "Microsoft vs Apple" paradigm contributed greatly, I would argue, to the mindset that led to us having a mobile OS duopoly today. If not for Microsoft actively, aggressively, and, above all, illegally throwing their weight around in the 1990s to make sure they were the only option for most people, we could very easily have had a half-dozen different OSes with open standards governing interoperability between them.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoApple should have bought them. The iPhone is a great portable console.
- thiht 3y agoNo. A phone is not a great portable console. Anything without physical buttons is not a great portable console.
- etempleton 3y agoThis leak likely killed any chance Nintendo would even entertain the talks and may setback Microsoft-Nintendo’s relationship. But Microsoft never have had a chance to buy Nintendo and likely never will. I don’t think Nintendo would ever sell unless they absolutely have to. And they are in a position of strength right now. They have some of the most valuable IP in the world and are just waking up to all of the opportunities they have to leverage that IP with moves into toys, theme parks, and movies and a Switch 2 is likely coming next year.
- fidotron 3y agoThe detail about using the investment fund to gain influence on the board is particularly interesting. This tactic is also used by other FAANGs as a way to evaluate (and exfiltrate) value in potential acquisitions. Microsoft themselves seem to have fallen into a never ending extreme scale build vs buy argument beloved of current dev culture, which wants to build just enough internally to make negotiations interesting but then just use capital muscle to buy the real thing, which they will then mismanage to destruction, requiring more, and repeat. This disturbing tendency has infested so much of US business it is why I don’t see the whole manufacturing onshoring working, as who wants to do something when you can just own it?
- joe__f 3y agoWhen I looked at this I thought the title had been shortened and the meaning was obfuscated. The idea that Nintendo would sell to Microsoft is pretty laughable to me.
- underseacables 3y agoAm I the only one that feels uneasy about Microsoft acquiring Nintendo?
- bombcar 3y agoI'd feel uneasy about ANYONE acquiring Nintendo, they're the only independent game console manufacturer; and arguably the only independent game manufacturer of note. Disney? Microsoft? Apple? Musk? The US Gov't? The Seattle Mariners? All of them would kill Nintendo.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoThis is actually an interesting argument for "why is Nintendo so protective when Sega and Microsoft show you don't have to?" Nintendo lives and dies by their mainline characters. Sega doesn't anymore and merged with Sammy Group after their failures with Saturn and Dreamcast; and Sega of Japan really didn't like Sonic the Hedgehog as a character that much - as evidenced by how much less popular he is in Japan than America. Microsoft could lose every major Xbox franchise and have it only be, what, ~10%-20% on their stock reports as a whole company? Whereas, if Nintendo lost Mario, the blow would be catastrophic. Just ask Sega - they lost over 200 Sonic the Hedgehog characters due to legal mistakes (Ken Penders incident).
- parl_match 3y ago>Whereas, if Nintendo lost Mario, the blow would be catastrophic. Honestly, I don't the loss of Mario would be catastrophic. What would be is _how_ they "lost" Mario - presumably through bad games and other properties.
- hot_gril 3y agoAt least they survived the CD-i Mario + Zelda games and the, uh, not-so-classic TV shows based on both franchises.
- RajT88 3y ago
- gjsman-1000 3y ago... and that was the day that all the executives conveniently forgot there was no way in hell that the government of Japan, the people of Japan, or the FTC would allow such a thing to happen.
- tpmx 3y agoYeah, Japan is different than the currently relatively meak US. Fiercely nationalistic. There is no way this would be allowed to happen.
- anaganisk 3y agoAs a genuine question, why are govts so protective of homegrown companies? Like unless they have a stake in them or have actually invested time and resources to build them. I'm no anti-govt guy. But if I want to sell my company I built without any govt benefits(TAX breaks go to all companies?) Then why am I not allowed to sell it to anyone I wish to. I know that companies run to govts for bailouts and other related reasons, but consider an ideal economy for +/- 20 years. I want to know the answer.
- parl_match 3y agoBecause governments often look at the bigger picture, as much as we like to pretend they don't.
- tpmx 3y agoClarification: This is what competent governments do. Many aren't.
- slongfield 3y agoGovernments do a lot of things that are effectively investing time and resources into their homegrown companies--things like education of the populace, building and maintaining physical infrastructure, and management of the legal system, to name just a few essentials. There's basically no way to operate a company without benefiting from some government.
- skywhopper 3y ago"Nintendo's future exists off of their own hardware" reveals just how poorly their competition understands Nintendo's success.
- wslh 3y agoNow we hope that all Nintendo consoles will be retro compatible until Windows 1.0. I would add to the Game & Watch series.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoI don't think this view comes from a poor understanding of Nintendo's success. Remember when the Wii came out and people thought the motion controls sucked and games which heavily used them didn't sell well? What about Switch games which make heavy use of motion controls (e.g. Super Mario Odyssey)? Turns out those sell well today because Nintendo invested yesterday in their motion-reading capabilities: hardware. Certainly they see a lot of success due to choices around branding and going the Disney route of protecting their rights to Mickey Mouse^W^W Mario at all costs but they also see a lot of success from hardware innovations they've made in gaming.
- tehsauce 3y agoOof, right as the switch demolished the xbox in hardware sales.
- Apreche 3y agoThe one thing we've learned from these leaks of Microsoft documents is that the XBox people have a shockingly wrong understanding of their own industry. I guess that explains their lack of success, at least relative to the competition.
- turndown 3y agoAgreed. They don’t know what to do with xbox yet think they can steer Nintendo or valve(let alone manage to purchase them.)
- sheepshear 3y agoI've always thought that the Xbox should double as a regular Windows desktop, but I guess I'm missing something about how that would not be the best strategy.
- turndown 3y agoI think Microsoft learned their lesson last time trying to make the Xbox One into a media/gaming solution and just stick to video games now. I also wonder about how much money they see in that, too. Most people don’t give a shit about non-laptops anymore, which you can just plug into your tv anyway.
- sheepshear 3y agoI can see that.
- miffy900 3y agoIt's also sad that they're even considering this. They first considered this 20+ years ago before they launched the first Xbox; it was more plausible back then, compared than now, considering Nintendo's strengths with the Switch. Imagine if MS had succeeded with acquiring Nintendo back in the 2000's - I'm certain the Switch would never see the light of day.
- TechPlasma 3y agoWhat really stood out to me was his misunderstanding about the growth priorities of the board of Nintendo. Nintendo is a stable company. It doesn't need constant growth to succeed. Something that Microsoft probably could learn a thing or two from a much older and still successful business.
- sharts 3y agoYou never have to chase growth if continue to improve your products in a substantive way and give customers what they want. This is a far cry from Microsoft that, for every step or two forward, there’s always at least a step backward in some crucial way. But this is generally the culture of American companies and society where grift is rewarded for some reason.
- shodan757 3y ago"But our BoD has seen the full writeup on Nintendo (and Valve) and they are fully supportive on either if opportunity arises as am I." (emphasis mine) Oh please God no, not Valve. MS has changed pretty dramatically since the Gates/Ballmer days, but Valve is way too valuable to computer gaming to be owned by a company like MS. Luckily Valve is privately owned, and even if they were public, their valuation would/should be pretty insane. So I think anyone buying Valve is unlikely.
- pkulak 3y agoValve may be the single greatest asset to desktop Linux at this point (after Redhat, possibly), and it would be such a shame to have all that destroyed.
- hot_gril 3y agoEven if I still played video games, I wouldn't care what happens to Valve. They were the reason some games forced you to install this Steam nonsense and launch it every time to run em, which seemed to just be for DRM purposes. MS would probably do something just as annoying, though.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- germandiago 3y agoNo! My beloved Nintendo no, please.
- cush 3y agoIn what world would any gaming hardware manufacturer not consider how they could acquire the best games? As if there aren’t comparable emails in Sony inboxes. Seems like a very expected line of thinking and strategy for any exec
- NegativeLatency 3y agoI hope this does not happen, but maybe we'd finally get some remakes of Diddy Kong Racing, Donkey Kong 64 and other good games by Rare
- NickC25 3y agoWould love for this to happen. Might even get a 3rd Banjo-Kazooie game out of it, too...I could dream but another Conker's BFD, Killer Instinct, or even Perfect Dark would be fun too. Rare had some absolutely excellent games on Nintendo consoles. Noticeably, they went to shit when MSFT got them.
- summerlight 3y agoI remember the report that when Microsoft initially planned to enter the console space they wanted to recruit Miyamoto with 10x salary. The proposal was outright rejected because he cannot do anything meaningful without the team and culture he had been building over decades. In the creative industry, teams and cultures are (almost) everything. Nintendo will unlikely keep its team and culture when it's acquired by some random US big techs. Japan and US just have so different corporate cultures at their fundamental level. Think about a hypothetical scenario; another big economical crisis is looming and Satya mandated Nintendo to cut 5~10% of its HQ employees. Would Nintendo keep its unique culture after its first ever lay-off? I don't think so.
- NickC25 3y agoI have a (now retired) relative who spent a majority of his career as a high-level MSFT exec, and he knew a lot of the OG Xbox guys. As a kid in the early 2000s who grew up with Nintendo consoles, I asked him over the years more than once why there was no effort to purchase Nintendo. His answer every time was a simple "the Japanese corporate culture and the American corporate culture have differences in ways that money simply cannot overcome" As much as I'd love to be able to play Mario or Zelda in 4k 60fps, or play FZero or Smash Brothers over Xbox Live, it's just not gonna happen.
- bbradley406 3y ago>As much as I'd love to be able to play Mario or Zelda in 4k 60fps You can do this on PC with emulators if you want to. It's probably not "legal" but if you have already paid for a copy of the game there isn't much harm in it.
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoNotably a >3 year old email, at this point. Nintendo is incredibly litigious & defensive. They're both loved, but one of the most carefully managed companies. Most of their platform is 1st party software. Personally I can't think of a worse more dangerous acquisition for Microsoft. Microsoft was won a lot of trust over the last decade by participating nicely in the intertwingularizing world, by supporting devs and power users, by having a useful helpful web browser & web standards team, by having great open community around azure and wsl and others. Having an arm of their business suddenly operating in old world cut throat tight modes of operation like Nintendo would be a terrible look. And Nintendo wouldn't be Nintendo without that totalized control they've spent decades growing into.
- turquoisevar 3y agoIt doesn’t just seem to be hopes, but actually taking steps in acquiring equity to play the long game: “I say "until recently" as our former MS BoD member ValueAct has been heavily acquiring shares of Nintendo […] and I've kept in touch with Mason Morfit as he's been acquiring. It's likely he will be pushing for more from Nintendo stock which could create opportunities for us. Without that catalyst I don't see an angle to a near term mutually agreeable merger of Nintendo and MS and I don't think a hostile action would be a good move so we are playing the long game.” The hubris is also palpable: “It's just taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off of their own hardware. A long time.... :-)” And then there’s the matter of them contemplating buying TikTok: https://www.threads.net/@techemails/post/CxYy4BdS99n/ https://www.threads.net/@techemails/post/CxYy4BdS99n/ MS/Spencer is acting like a teenager that just got their hands on their parent’s credit card. The message is clear, they’re on the lookup to buy all kinds of stuff in an attempt to conglomerate everything under the MS umbrella. All the nonsense uttered to appease regulators during the BGS and ABK is just that, nonsense to reassure regulators.