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… :-)
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.
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I don’t see that happening for Game Pass, but do you know which company has already displaced ownership for their subscription service? Nintendo.
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 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.
In the context of gaming, Sony and Microsoft couldn’t be more different. I can get over Sony’s terrible store backend or refund policies. I know how they work, how to avoid pitfalls, etc. at the end of the day, they make the better games that I like to play and have shown over the course of thirty years to support gaming first.
No no… it’s the part that Sony owns a headphone company, and a TV company, and their first product was a rice cooker.
The point was that they enter a space using funds from one of their other arms to strongarm away competition and become a conglomerate that owns and operates a huge percentage of people’s lives and product purchases leaving almost no breathing room for other companies to ever enter.
It’s not about refund policy or their games it’s about the subsidized products they can only afford by min/maxing other economic spaces they control
Nintendo was founded in the 1800s as a playing card company. To some extend every manufacturer started with something else. You’re misrepresenting my point. Sony entered the market and competed based on actual merit. They have grown their own in-house talent, in-house IPs, and technology just like Nintendo. Microsoft almost threw in the towel in 2013. There recent moves scream Embrace, Extend, Extinguish where they don’t have to worry about pesky things like making good games, but can force gamers to pay them monthly for whatever they feel like putting out, or just let third parties do the work and use their power to force them into whatever pricing Microsoft wants. People thinking GamePass is great should brush up on their history of what Microsoft does when they get the upper hand. I say this as a someone who uses a ton of Microsoft Products outside of gaming.
Sony and Nintendo are both terrible, hypocritical companies in their own right. That by no means absolves Microsoft of being who they are, and the pro-consumer tactic Xbox has employed for the past 5 or 6 years is definitely a calculated move and the result of them falling hard after the Don Mattrick era, but to say that Microsoft (and by that I assume you mean Xbox) is terrible for gaming is a bad take. The gaming landscape is better because Xbox exists. Competition and choice empower the consumer. If you think Sony wouldn’t be an even shittier company without the competition Xbox provides, you really don’t understand how these avaricious corporate conglomerates operate.
Funny thing being that the only reason SONY is in gaming was to screw Nintendo. They had a hardware partnership that fell apart because SONY was putting the thumbscrews to Nintendo over revenue sharing. Nintendo said, you’re not the only one who can provide what we need, and dumped them. PlayStation was the direct result.
That’s a incredibly biased way of saying a business deal feel through, Nintendo went to a competitor, and Sony decided to prove Nintendo made the wrong choice and stay in the market
This humiliating turnabout enraged Sony president Norio Ohga, but though it seemed sudden from the outside, problems had been boiling between the two companies for some time. The main issue was an agreement over how revenue would be collected – Sony had proposed to take care of money made from CD sales while Nintendo would collect from cartridge sales, and suggested that royalties would be figured out later. “Nintendo went bananas, frankly, and said that we were stepping on its toll booth and that it was totally unacceptable,” explains Chris Deering, who at the time worked at Sony-owned Columbia Pictures but would go on to head the PlayStation business in Europe. “They just couldn’t agree and it all fell apart.” - https://web.archive.org/web/20140206193956/http://www.edge-online.com/features/making-playstation/
Nintendo broke their contract with Sony. I think it’s obvious that they messed that one up. What could have been right? Competition is good.
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?
Your emergency fund is usually recommended to be 3-6 months of expenses, not salary…though I guess for plenty of people, even at high salaries, that may be the same number, but then you’ll never have savings anyway. Really your emergency fund is for however much risk you can tolerate, like if you end up unemployed for 3-6 months, but your emergency fund is for things other than just unemployment, like sudden medical expenses or replacing a water heater. If you’re comfortable with a line of credit on your home being your emergency fund, go for it. There’s some risk to that, but there’s different kinds of risk to everything.
Yes, because otherwise how the fuck can I afford to move apartments when my landlord raises the price by a thousand dollars a month. But also I have no assets so it’s my entire savings and I can’t put it anywhere because I need it within a year.
So yeah some of us are fucked and the idea that a middle class household would make 100k in 6 months means you have no touch on reality for real wages for lots of people.
Sorry, forgot this was an international community. $100k CAD. So $75k USD. We’ve the same 100k bank-insurance limit here, but its $100k CAD.
Either way, I know plenty of people who make near $200k of household income and are still fucked because they didn’t get into the housing market in time before the door slammed shut (average home in Greater Toronto is now well north of a $million, even with our stupid-expensive interest rates). Like, teachers and realtors make $90k CAD after a few years of experience these days, but that doesn’t accomplish much when rent keeps jumping and nobody can afford to buy. Basically the only reason everybody isn’t eating cat-food is they’re either in a pre-rent-deregulation unit or they bought before it all hit the fan.
Also, side-note: the traditional concept of “middle class” is not the modern expansive definition of “basically everybody who doesn’t own either a private jet or live in a cardboard box”. That is, somebody who pays rent and has a job that doesn’t require grad-school used to be considered “working class”. It’s just that for some dumb reason we all collectively decided that “working class” was something to be embarrassed about.
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.
There’s some use for an emergency fund, but since businesses this size have steady streams of revenue, they usually only want to sit on tons of cash when they can’t find anything better to invest it in. Microsoft went on acquisition sprees, but other companies might buy back shares to return that excess cash to investors.
Microsoft Games needs to be forced to split off from Microsoft.
That would mean Minecraft could actually be released for more than Android and Windows again. That game was on every platform then Bedrock came out and it’s on 2. They even said Mac and Linux versions were coming after release and it’s been years. A C++ version of the game is ideal. It runs faster, it plays better, they also integrated a marketplace and overall I like bedrock but they only did it to keep a monopoly on gaming.
That said, Game Pass is uniquely tied to Windows at this point and has very little ability to have the same protections on Mac or Linux. Windows is the only OS that can hard lock you away from your files. For better or worse. Game Pass is a neat system but also has major downfalls.
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…”
As much as I like Microsoft, I don’t want them to touch Nintendo. I have no faith that they would continue doing what Nintendo does well.
An Xbox branded portable with a soc taken from an Android tablet released 8 years ago would tank badly
Nintendo is successful because of their games, not because their hardware is the best
That and some of their hardware concepts. When they work, they really work.
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.
Honestly WiiU was sick as hell for MH3U cuz I could have all my UI on the other screen so it was super cool for immersion.
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
They tried to be the best in hardware too but that failed so they stick with software
lol just saw the timeline, imagine spending years of r&d for the best game console on the market, then microsoft beats you by 3 days
Twice actually. If they used CD instead of cartridges N64 would beat the first PS.
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.
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.
It’ll never happen. Nintendo would laugh them off if they even suggested it.
Nintendo is a publicly traded company. It can happen against their wishes. This is known as a hostile takeover.
Japan’s first successful hostile takeover only happened in June 2019
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.
Don’t apologise, this is great insight. Thank you for your comment.
Very interesting, thank yoi
While that’s true successful hostile takeovers by foreigners are rare in Japan. Japanese companies often implement a poison pill to thwart a takeover.
What exactly does that mean?
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.
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.
Microsoft tried buying Nintendo a few years before the first Xbox came out, and Nintendo execs laughed to their face.
Source: Dean Takahashi’s Inside Xbox, very interesting book.
Lol that’s great
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.
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.
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.
Neither was Activision. They make more money than Nintendo does.
Only good I see is pc ports, but then I see Microsoft having Nintendo shoving in mtx and potentially less quality Nintendo titles so overall bad.
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.
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
