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… :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s pretty awful that people like Phil define themselves by the ruin they can inflict on society.
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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.
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.
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.
I hate all these bastards. That’s why I only use gentoo and play games I find in thrift stores and google drive folders.
everything can happened. we already have Tencent buy Key this year.
Celebrating an acquisition. That’s double detention for you, Phil.
