Anyone paying attention to the video game landscape over the past month might feel like companies are in an ongoing war to buy up independent studios that make great products.
The acquisition ball has pretty much always been rolling – it’s part of a companies growth – but Microsoft’s $7.5 billion acquisition of Bethesda really upped the ante. Then, earlier last month, Take-Two Interactive purchased Zynga, the company behind FarmVille and Words With Friends, for a massive $12.7 billion.
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That $12.7 billion was the biggest video game-related acquisition for just eight days before Microsoft came in and announced it was spending a jaw-dropping $68.7 billion to acquire Activision Blizzard, the studio and publisher behind Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch. PlayStation then joined in last week when it revealed it was buying Bungie, the studio that created Halo and Destiny, for $3.6 billion.
Many began to speculate if Nintendo would get involved in the current studio buy-up happening but if the recent quarterly results investor call for the company is any indication, Nintendo isn’t interested.
“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 to the company,” Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa said, as reported by Bloomberg.
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As the publication notes, Furukawa recently said late last year that Nintendo has plans to invest roughly $870 million in strengthing its game development, focusing primarily on organic growth. In other words, it sounds like Nintendo’s plan is to continue to invest in the studios it currently owns and works with to output even more great software for the Nintendo Switch, which has surpassed 103 million units sold.
Bloomberg reports that Furukawa said during today’s quarterly results call that Nintendo has no plans to change its current investment plan but that the company isn’t against acquisitions if they are deemed necessary.
For more from today’s Nintendo quarterly results, read about how Nintendo says the Switch is only in the middle of its lifecycle, and then check out this story about how the Switch has officially sold more than the Wii.
[Source: Bloomberg]
Do you think Nintendo needs to start acquiring more studios? Let us know in the comments below!
