One of the biggest questions investors had for Nintendo during their latest financial earnings call was whether the company would be joining Microsoft and Sony in spending big money on acquiring companies. Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa has explained this won’t be the case as they instead rely upon creating their own first party titles.
Who would Nintendo buy?
Nintendo is a company whose most popular titles are those made by their own studios or that feature their own IPs. A big-name third-party studio wouldn’t easily fit into this business model. As Tokyo-based analyst Serkan Toto told Bloomberg:
I really have a hard time imagining which of the big ones they could even be interested in buying. Nintendo will always stay Nintendo. The company has always relied on first-party games, and I don’t see any reason why they should change.
Furukawa reiterated that Nintendo is unlikely to change, stating “our brand was built upon products crafted with dedication by our employees, and having a large number of people who don’t possess Nintendo DNA in our group would not be a plus”. Nintendo aren’t necessarily against acquisitions, but the company doesn’t deem it necessary right now. Instead, Nintendo had already confirmed they would be spending money on strengthening its own game development, primarily focusing on “promoting organic growth”.
On the other hand, Sony has just agreed to acquire Bungie while Microsoft announced similar intentions with Activision at the start of January. During their own earnings presentation, Sony announced they had allocated around $17.4 billion for acquisitions, buyouts, and other “strategic investment”. So far Sony has spent around $7.4 billion of that budget, leaving a fairly large budget of $10 billion to spend throughout the rest of the year. PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan has already said fans should expect more acquisitions in the future.
In other news, a Bloodborne PSX demake is proving to be incredibly popular with fans after it was downloaded more than 100,000 times in a single day. Unfortunately this seems to be the only PC version of the game players are likely to get for a while. Elsewhere, Sony has detailed all of the features players will encounter during their first few hours with Gran Turismo 7.
