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Soundwave on 24 February 2014
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Fusioncode said:
Soundwave said:
Fusioncode said:
Soundwave said:

Rather than selling the game division IMO they should make an alliance/partnership with Nintendo.

Have Ken Lobb head up a joint Microsoft-Nintendo game studio, he knows Nintendo well as he worked for NOA in the past.

Hand over the development of future Halo/Gears titles to be overseen by Nintendo, they will ensure a good quality product. Give Nintendo the keys back to Rare and let them oversee 343 Studios. 

If they sell to Amazon, Amazon is pushing the Android OS (or their own version of it). I don't know how that would sit with Microsoft ... Nintendo is obviously no threat to them OS wise. I think Nintendo has been humbled enough that they could be decent stewarts of MS' gaming assets. 

Microsoft already tried to buy Nintendo for 25 billion. Nintendo thought the offer was a joke. I doubt they would even consider something like this. 


This is actually untrue, Nintendo did take the offer pretty seriously, Yamauchi went over it for about a month. 

It's actually the fact that MS made this offer I think that Nintendo in part got spooked and decided they couldn't compete in the regular game business any more and had to do things like seeking out casuals. 

10+ years later, now that casuals have dropped Nintendo, perhaps now there would be a yearning to go back to a more stable market, as long as Nintendo doesn't have to compete with MS' giant warchest I think they would be OK with that. 

They didn't go after casuals because of Microsoft, the Xbox only barely outsold the Gamecube, they went after the casuals because of how poorly the Gamecube sold. Then they forgot how poorly the Gamecube sold and went right back to making the same mistakes. I highly doubt Iwata would let Nintendo get bought out by MS, he doesn't seem like the type of guy who would want to get bought by a larger corporation. 

I don't even see why Microsoft would want to buy Nintendo right now. Their core philosophies couldn't be more different. Nintendo wants to make core gaming machines, Microsoft wants to create an enternainment device. Microsoft is going for teenagers and young adults, Nintendo is gunning for kids and 40 year olds who grew up playing Mario. 


Personally I think MS was the straw that in a lot of ways broke the camel's back. If there is no MS in the business, Nintendo would have a lot more room to operate and they were fine competing against Sony. 

But Microsoft, I think internally, to put it mildly they were afraid of MS. MS came into the business and started buying away a lot Nintendo's main talent. They hired most of NST's staff, hired away Ken Lobb, threw a ton of money at Rare ... I think for Nintendo as a relatively small company, once the GameCube started to lag behind in the market, their strategy basically has forever become "we do the opposite of whatever Sony/MS do". 

Which worked for a little while, but isn't working so great now because Apple/Google's impact on the casual gaming market has been an even more shocking blow to them. 

MS wouldn't buy Nintendo, but I think a partnership could be made there, where MS could rest easy that the game division would be taken good care of by Nintendo. 

MS doesn't give a crap about having say a 50 million console userbase as they'll always see that as a failure for not catching Sony, but for Nintendo they'd be as happy as a pig in mud with that size userbase and would be able to make a good amount of money off it, even if those profits are peanuts by MS' standard.