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.
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.
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.
@ampersandrew @UrLogicFails worst thing I could think of would be yearly bland releases barely worth playing and gutting the innovation they bring.
It’s not like every release is brilliant or great (looking at you pokemon violet/scarlet), but look at what happened to Blizzard pre and post acquisition.
I already think Mario Kart is bland and not worth playing, so you’ll need a harder sell for me. Also, the yearly release model is just about dead these days; very few can pull it off still, and it tends to not be as lucrative as just making DLC for one major version at a time, like Nintendo is already doing now with Mario Kart. The truth is, at this point, I don’t care what kind of quality Nintendo’s games are made with if they’re sticking to the business practices they’re using currently. I haven’t bought Tears of the Kingdom or even pirated it. My time and money are better spent with companies making better products.
@ampersandrew @UrLogicFails better is subjective for sure. But if you got a list of better games I can play with my 5 year old, I’m honestly all ears. So far nothing is beating Mario Odyssey and Pokémon Eevee.
Preservation wise and business practice wise I’m also not sure of anyone is ‘good’, but I’d again be more than happy to be better educated on the subject.
You can sit a 5 year old in front of all sorts of games that they’d enjoy, but Mario and Pokemon is what they’ve been exposed to, by you or friends or both. You’ll have a difficult time arguing with them over the importance of how your individual market actions have lasting effects on what gets produced; that’s true. But Nintendo only has a monopoly on marketing kid-friendly games, not producing them…not that that will matter to your 5 year old.
As for preservation, server dependencies are bad. F-Zero 99 requires a server and a subscription to be played, full stop. That game will not survive, and other battle royales or even other “99” games are already being decommissioned and will cease to exist. Online multiplayer can still exist without server dependencies, via private servers or LAN or direct IP connection; these features are becoming increasingly rare for business reasons, so keep your eye out for them. Without these features, multiplayer will disappear at some point. DRM is bad. While it often doesn’t bother people who purchase legitimately, sometimes it does, including long after the initial release period, if that DRM hasn’t been patched out, because the company authorizing the DRM usually doesn’t care about the repercussions of it two decades from now. Baldur’s Gate 3, not a game to play with your 5 year old for at least another decade, has all of those multiplayer features and is available DRM-free. BG3 will be preserved. The gold standard for preservation is open source, where anyone can view the code and change it, which means it will always run on whatever computers we use in the future. This is why Doom is ported to everything with a screen and an input device. But open sourcing your game is a hard sell for developers.
@ampersandrew @UrLogicFails okay but how is Nintendo worse than other companies in that regard? Is microsoft or Sony better at the preservation than them in some way I don’t understand? Are they better companies to support in that metric?
As for the kid thing, they don’t really get much pick in the matter of what game I let them try yet. It’s just that I can’t FIND any games outside of Nintendos stuff that is quality and fun for the family. It’s mostly poor quality IP tie ins. I’ve looked!
Random game suggestion: Luigi’s Mansion 3 is a great coop game that I’m sure you and your daughter would love
Not even Microsoft is selling ROMs, at most they make their older games retrocompatible on console. From one locked device to another. At that point you might as well dump your old Nintendo games and the result is the same.
Their new games come out on PC day and date, and they haven’t released a console-only game since Rare Replay, if I’m not mistaken. “ROMs” are a little before Microsoft’s time, if we’re being honest.
Sure, but if you are talking about Super Metroid ROMs, you are talking legacy releases, and Microsoft didn’t bother to rerelease their classic XBox games on PC, so there’s no reason to assume they would do it to SNES games if they acquired Nintendo.
Well, there is, because SNES emulation is trivial, and Xbox emulation is much less so. Great SNES emulation is available open source and in many different flavors with many different features, and all you need to do is supply the ROM, preferably in a legal way. Most of Xbox’s best games already have PC ports, and Microsoft’s shift to supporting PC equally is as recent as only a handful of years ago. Especially in the interest of making the Game Pass offering more uniform across PC and Xbox, they still may yet backport those remaining Xbox games to PC in some way just like they ported Age of Empires II to console. Meanwhile, I have no prayer of Nintendo releasing their games on an open platform like PC unless they have an extreme change of leadership or another extreme failure in the market akin to the Wii U.
The newer XBox consoles are x86 architecture devices with an operating system that is similar to Windows. If they can maintain retrocompatibility with older titles, that means they have a functioning emulator or compatibility layer for classic XBox and 360 games. It would be trivial for Microsoft to release them for PC but they don’t seem interested in doing that. Whatever obstacles there may be there, they are not technical. Considering that, it’s unlikely that they would take a different approach regarding older Nintendo titles.
The example of Age of Empires II if anything indicates that they want to have a console-centric approach towards older titles. So, it’s just speculation to assume that Microsoft acquiring Nintendo would lead to their games being ported to PC. On the flipside, I’d be more concerned that Microsoft’s more inconsistent quality standards and monetization tendencies would make their way into Nintendo titles.
You really think M$ is better about this? You still can’t play any Forza Motorsport games on back compat, there may be some technical reason for this, but I doubt it. They delist games before the next one in the series comes out too, which is the wildest shit. you can’t buy FM7 anymore and haven’t been able to for a while. The new one isn’t even out yet.
This practice boggles the mind because I can go on Steam and most publishers are still selling their decade + old games.
That one’s on car manufacturers. Anyone that licenses real cars deals with the same nonsense. Those games in particular are not built to be sold forever, perhaps because car manufacturers only want you to think about the new models. It’s also probably a factor in why the upcoming Forza is built as a “live service” that will keep getting updated, though I suspect that means old cars get removed in favor of their new models somehow.
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.
@Dark_Arc weirdly all my old consoles and games work. I’ve definitely made more e-waste from PC and upgrades over the years than consoles. (let’s not talk about phones…)
PC parts can be reused and resold until they’re irrelevant. Decades old PC software can run on the latest hardware (often much better than it did on its original hardware).
Meanwhile, consoles do one job only, play games. If something breaks, more often than not you get an entirely new console; maybe the manufacturer actually fixes your old one (if they’re still working on it).
They also lose security updates and become opportunities for botnets to infect and exploit. No device should be used past its end of software life that’s connected to the Internet. Regardless of that, many people do continue to use old consoles and smart phones that are long past their socially responsible expiration date.
Beyond that, if someone has a computer capable of playing a game, to force them to buy a different piece of hardware is by definition unnecessary ewaste.
Decades old PC software can run on the latest hardware (often much better than it did on its original hardware).
This is increasingly less true as the software dependencies get more complicated. See also, Rockstar selling pirated games because that was the way to get it running…
Window’s compatibility layer is still far beyond what a console provides. Beyond that, WINE (for Linux) is increasingly able to run Windows programs from many decades… In a sense, Linux is becoming the best Windows compatibility layer for old software and games in the world.
You don’t need to reach 100% to provide value/be better.