1y ago

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

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

This comes from the FTC document leak. source

Archive link: https://archive.ph/NF2r0

At some point, getting Nintendo would be a career moment and I honestly believe a good move for both companies. It's just taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off of their own hardware. A long time.... :-)

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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.

The ActiBlizz merger needs to be shot down and Microsoft Games needs to be forced to split off from Microsoft. This tactic of "Make all the money in one sector, then use that unlimited money to invade another sector, force small businesses out by operating at a loss, and then enshittifying the entire sector to a state worse than it was originally" has to stop - across all sectors.
If you can't survive in your own sector on your own merits without money from Daddy Corpo, you deserve to die.
I also hate that Spencer talks like "sitting on a big pile of cash" instead of gambling it on the market is fucking stupid. Classic "NOW NOW NOW" American capitalism.
- I get called a Sony fanboy for calling out Microsoft for being terrible for gaming. I haven’t owned a Nintendo device since N64, but I have nothing bad to say about them. They make great games.
  
  It’s weird calling for one mega corp to be split up while supporting another mega corp that owns more than the first. Everyone needs a reality check if they think any mega corp doesn’t want the same thing.
- I also hate that Spencer talks like “sitting on a big pile of cash” instead of gambling it on the market is fucking stupid.
  If you're sitting on cash, you're guaranteed to lose money to inflation. If you invest it wisely, you have a good chance of beating inflation. Even in personal finance, it's very stupid to sit on a big pile of cash; everything above and beyond an emergency fund or savings for a short-term goal should be invested.
  
  Honestly even the idea of an emergency fund, I mean accounting dorks say things like "save six months salary in an accessible, liquid form".
  Does anybody really do that? I mean for a middle-class well-educated dual-income household that's probably close to 100k, which we were all recently reminded the limit for bank account insurance.
  If you own your home doesn't it make more sense to have a secured line of credit set for emergencies and then ride as close to the wire as you feel comfortable?
  
  I'm assuming that "big pile of cash" is their emergency fund - Spencer implies as much when he says that it serves as an impediment to buying them out.

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.
- They don’t care about gamers or games
  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

I know these Chucklehead Executive Officers only exist to enrich the companies they run and by extension, themselves, but they all seem to fail to understand that running a company is not just merge and acquire. Of course that is what capitalism wants, but there is room for there to be more than five Big Names in Gaming, and a MSFT-owned Nintendo would not be what it is today. You don't become an innovator by buying the innovative companies.
Yes, Nintendo's hardware has gradually fallen "behind the times" (if you look at raw power, generationally) but guess what? A majority of people are still willing to play Mario, Zelda, and many more quality first-party titles on potatoes as long as the games are fun.
Nintendo has taken risks and made some weird crap over the years, but that is exactly what makes them different from the other two. I don't think we would have had Nintendo Switch today without the wild consumer success of the Wii and then the massive pendulum swing of the WiiU (which was tethered to the home just like that new PS5 Portal display controller). They came to market with an R&D Wii 1.5 prototype that flopped, but that sent them right back to the drawing board to rethink it, creating the Switch, which effectively merged their console and handheld divisions.
I am not a betting person, but if I was, I would be placing my chips on the card company-turned beloved video game creator that turns 134 this week, and not the American conglomerate that thinks the entire future of gaming is subscriptions and microtransactions on the third place console.
- Nintendo does have a lot of issues, but they’re clearly a company that still puts a lot of love into their games and products. I hope they keep on making great games, and maybe they’ll even make better hardware some day. Even if they don’t, not every system has to offer the latest and greatest to be fun and successful. Nintendo proved that time and time again.

"absorbing and destroying a unique company would be a real feather in the old cap"
- I don't have a lot of specific love for any company, but Nintendo getting acquired by literally anyone would be a sad day.

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.
- Embrace, extend, extinguish. That's MS's strategy, by their own words.

Getting Nintendo would be a career moment for me
Who cares about your career? How could it be a justification for anything?
- It's a justification for him personally? Tbh I wouldn't say such a cringe thing even in internal emails
  
  Sounds like a “you want us to buy Nintendo? Me too buddy…”

And gone would be the innovation like Wii,3DS and Switch.

No good could come of this

It's pretty awful that people like Phil define themselves by the ruin they can inflict on society.

How would they plan to do that? Foreign investment in Japanese companies is heavily regulated, much more than it is regulated in the Americas or Europe.
- Not even that, but hostile takeovers are still exceedingly rare in Japan among domestic firms.
  What buzz there is over this is just ethnocentric thinking.

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.

Sounds awful

I hate all these bastards. That's why I only use gentoo and play games I find in thrift stores and google drive folders.

Boy would I love to see Nintendo's future in the hands of anyone except Nintendo. That's the only way their future will be off their own hardware, and probably the only way they become less of a barrier to game preservation. For those of you afraid of Microsoft absorbing Nintendo and becoming a monopoly, check the date on that e-mail and rest assured they can't get away with it anymore anyway.
- @ampersandrew @UrLogicFails for better or worse Nintendo does things their own way. You can bet you'd see yearly mario kart releases if that IP belonged to anyone else, and I don't think that would be for the better.
  
  Is that the worst thing you can think of? Because that sounds like more than an acceptable trade if it meant that I could legally buy a ROM of Super Metroid I could play on my Steam Deck, or if I could legally play Tears of the Kingdom on a machine that can run it at 60 FPS, or if the first F-Zero game made in 20 years wasn't a live service battle royale with an expiration date baked into the game.
  
  You mean we won't have to buy ewaste electronics to play Mario Kart? Sign me up.
  Realistically though, I'd bet on a "Mario Kart Mushroom Kingdom Racing" release (or something) that would just be a cross platform live service.
  ... and honestly I'll take that any day over Nintendo, which I've given $0 in over a decade because I refuse to buy their ewaste. I would love to have their games on PC though.

everything can happened. we already have Tencent buy Key this year.

Celebrating an acquisition. That's double detention for you, Phil.

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