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

Gaming@beehaw.org – 142 points – 1 years ago

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

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.... :-)

Email chain between Phil Spencer, Chris Capossela, and Takeshi Numoto discussing the potentially hostile purchase of Nintendo, ZeniMax, WB Games, and TikTok

You are viewing a single comment

View all comments Show the parent comment

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.