Nuvendil said:
Random question but the answers are not hard to figure out. In the case of Cing, their games never sold all that well. Their games were niche, at most times very niche, and didn't match with the amount of money they were spending on development. It wouldn't be advisable to bail them out of bankruptcy if they are losing money on a consistent basis. Especially after several releases. AlphaDream we know much less about. But from what we can gather, there seems to have been some pretty serious financial mismanagement. That's another thing you don't want to throw money at. You could buy the company, but if they are no longer producing the quality releases that made them worth partnering with, what's the point? You can just as easily hire people from the company after it disbands rather than shouldering the burden of actually owning the company. As for IS and Next Level, they might let them close if they went the way of Cing and AlphaDream. Nintendo's not responsible to prop up a floundering company for old times' sake. But that's not a likely thing to happen. IS is far more integrated with Nintendo's operations for one, so they have a lot of money coming in from work done with Nintendo beyond just their own releases. And Next Level just produced by far their biggest success yet. In short, Nintendo doesn't run a charity any more than any other platform holder or publisher. It is not their obligation to prop up a company that is collapsing due to lack of sales and mismanagement brought on by their own actions and releases. Nintendo as a publisher funds these projects, they shoulder financial risks of their own to give these devs a shot. If they blow it repeatedly or squander their gains with mismanagement it is not then Nintendo's job to spend more money to keep their lights on. And that goes for any publisher. And worth noting most of these devs have no interest in being owned by Nintendo or any publisher during their peak. Studios like Next Level, Cing, AlphaDream, and IS are independent on purpose. The only reason they would maybe be interested in selling to Nintendo or anyone else is because they are desperate for the cash. Which is to say, they are only interested in selling typically well after they were worth buying. Edit: Also what Rol said. Nintendo typically buys companies that are fully on board and at times even prefer the studio approach them about such a relationship rather than the other way round. Nintendo's culture and structure is unique, you have to be down with becoming very deeply integrated with Nintendo's development operations. |
Obligatory reminder that in inteligent system's case they, at its core roots, are a development tool development company, so a LOT of what they contribute is probably behind the scenes, and is in fact, a bigger contributer to nintendo that you might think at first glance with them only making niche games.
Both HAL and Intsys are two second party companies that nintendo WILL try to save in case of a catastrofic failure, the two companies are de facto a subsitiary of nintendo. comparing the relation between theses two and any other third party (yes even gamefreak).... yeah no. these are probably the only two companies that can casually just ASK nintendo for any of their IPs and use them....
