The company acquisitions are one of the strong topics in terms of video games this year, since in early January Microsoft announced that it had reached an agreement to buy Activision Blizzard for more than $60 billion dollars, while last week Sony announced the purchase of Bungee. However, the president of Nintendo says that its company does not plan to enter this competitionsince their intention is to expand their internal teams and not acquire new ones.
The present day Nintendo made his report with the latest financial results that cover until December 31, 2021, and in his report the president Shuntaro Furukawa touched on the subject of company acquisitions. In the president’s view, acquiring companies it is not something beneficial for them, because they would be acquiring employees with a work philosophy different from Nintendo’s.
Our brand was built on products made with the dedication of employees, and having a large number of people who do not have Nintendo DNA in our group would not add to the company,” said Furukawa.
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Last year also started with strong news, when it was revealed that Microsoft had reached an agreement to acquire Zenimax (Bethesda) that was finalized in mid-2021. However, since May of last year, President Furukawa had said that the following acquisitions that they make would be according to the technology that they need.
At that time Furukawa said that Nintendo is not interested in buying developer studios to have more exclusive games, because buying studios does not guarantee quality games. Instead, Furukawa is interested in the studios’ talent and the applications of the technologies they develop. The last acquisition Nintendo made was Next Level Gamesbut only thanks to the company deciding it was time to sell, otherwise Nintendo would not have taken action to acquire it.
Read more: Sony buying Bungie is not a response to Microsoft and Activision Blizzard.
Contrary to what you might think, actually Nintendo does not own most of the studios that develop exclusive games for its consoles. The most notable example is Intelligent Systems, the developers of Fire Emblem, WarioWare and Paper Mario, as it was formed by ex-Nintendo members and has worked closely with the company for almost 40 years, but they are an independent development studio.