Not Nintendo's style. They do some M&A, but at their own pace, and they do it to pick up the talent, not the IP.

It would be downright stupid to buy a company which is spending tons of money on competitors systems, and has exclusivity contracts with those competitors. The company would have to spend an entire generation porting/re-starting all their games, basically becoming a money pit in that time. See: Microsoft buying Rare.

Depends on the wording, they could pull all of the talent off those games and have them work on their projects instead. Then just toss a group of newbs on the exclusive project and laugh as the game bombs and hurts the system even more. Granted this wouldn't leave them smelling like a rose as the backlash could easily fall on them. But my point was that there are ways around those contracts unless they are very well worded.

In any case I don't think Nintendo will actually bother going around and buying up a bunch of third party developers. They might invest in a few key devs but other than that I would be very surprised to see them going much beyond that.

They should snatch up that Johnny Lee kid and have him come up with some new gadgets for the Wii...I think I would gladly buy most of the stuff he has come up with so far.

Nintendo did recently buy a majority in Monolith Soft, so this is NOT unheard of for them.

BTW, Monolith Soft developed Xenosaga, Baten Kaitos, and Namco X Capcom. Monolith Productions, which is still independent, developed No One Lives Forever and F.E.A.R.