I'm getting a 3DS anyway. hehe as long as Persona 5 get's released.

There's no possible losses from them buying out Atlus, either. Any counter arguments are just ridiculous.

Nintendo (if they would've bought out Atlus) would have another partner, one that made a lot of different IP's and that had very many fans. How is that not a benefit? Correct, it's a major benefit.

morenoingrato said: I want them to buy Atlus to piss of the Sony fanbase.

You are not supposed to state that allowed, Moreno.

To Nintendo, yes, but to other developers no.  The Fire Emblem games were never a shining example of graphical prowess.  The fact that every GBA game is graphically the same while all the DS have the same animations and only look a bit better proves that.  Expect to see Fire Emblem Awakening graphics on the next five games in the series.

Atlus games are much larger in budget than the Fire Emblem games and the sales are worse.  Whether these sales are correct or not, it's currently showing seven different Fire Emblem games above 500,000 sales, with two of them selling 970,000.  Fire Emblem Awakening will pass a million sales eventually.  Compare this to any Atlus "developed," not published,  game and there's only five which sold over 500,000, two of which are remakes/rereleases(Persona 3 FES and Persona 3 Portable.)  The highest selling game is Persona 4 on the PS2 with 820,000.

If you want some more comparisons, their highest selling DS title is Trauma Center with 340,000.  Highest selling RPG is Etrian Odyssey with 300,000.  Highest selling SMT/spinoff is Devil Survivor with 280,000.  SMT4 sales at 250,000 are their highest 3DS sales(which I believe should pass 400,000.)  

Rarely does Nintendo put any sort of massive budget towards their franchises.  Titles they can't get away without putting a decent budget that happens not to sell as well as they hope gets ignored for a very long time.  Metroid Prime The Other M anyone.  Sells well over a million copies, only for Nintendo to come out and say they were disappointed with the sales.  When has been the last time we've heard anything about a new Metroid other than fan made works? 

If Nintendo bought  Atlus we'd see maybe one or two games a generation.  So  only one or two games out of all Atlus' franchises.  Because western gamers happen not to like RPGs, or so Nintendo thinks, who knows if we'll even get the games that they do develop.

One thing that Nintendo are not desperate for is more IP's, they already got plenty of them. What they need is to create more studio's to work on the vast selection underused IP's. Why bother at great expense to buy out whole studio's & IP's you don't really need. When you could just headhunt the most talent people from each company instead to work on their existing IP's?

Nintendo need to maintain their fanbase and keep them happy, and at the moment, their supplies of Sony fans' tears are running dangerously low.

Failure to acquire Atlus could mean that supplies of Sony fans' tears could run out by as early as October 2013!

I'd like to see some good reasons why you think this. If anything, I'm playing SMTIV right now, and while the game's good I keep thinking it lacks a certain degree of polish in the presentation (Argh those sprites are so jarring with the artstyle they chose to represent it in). Cutscenes aren't even animated. 

completely 100% agree. i dont understand why ppl want this so bad do they even know what they are asking for?? look at how they treated Xenoblade and last story. those games should have been green lighted for localization on the spot but instead we had to fight tooth and nail for the games. when xenoblade was finally released they only did one small print run at one retailer nonetheless now its ridiculous rare and still in demand. Do you ppl want this same shit to happen with Atlus? Do you want to fight tooth and nail to get persona 5 localized? be ready to do so if nintendo buys them

I was too lazy to look up sales for Atlus games, but this is exactly what came to mind.  Thank you.  Atlus developed games, whether they make profit or not just don't do Nintendo level numbers.  Actually, they barely do Sony numbers much less other companies like Capcom or Konami.  Why would Nintendo waste their time pursuing a developer that could only marginaly benefit their income, much less add new adopters?  Like others have said, they'd likely want developers to groom their own products which do have a large market rather than a developer that is focused on its own niche titles.

But with the boom in indie games/devs, maybe the niche isn't so easy to sneeze at now a days.  And Nintendo acquiring them, if not helpful certainly wouldn't hurt them so who knows?

The only major game publishers that would benefit from purchasing Atlus straight up are Nintendo, Microsoft and EA.

Nintendo: Gets new employees to help them expand as well as a few that have some development experience on HD consoles which Nintendo sorely lacks and access to a popular Japanese franchise in Shin Megami Tensei and its spin offs like Persona.

Microsoft: They no doubt would like more Japanese support, having a company that produces more Japanese centric games exclusive to their consoles plus a major franchise like SMT would be a big boon in pushing more Japanese gamers into giving the Xbox One or whatever the Japanese equivalent of their Windows platform a shot.

EA: Technically, I could see them if they were really serious about increasing their international presence in Japan buying Atlus, farming a few of their games and using them as a international distribution arm. EA has more reason then Namco Bandai since that company barely tries to support it own major RPG brand and adding another could pretty much end with the end of one of the franchises for a long period of time... see every RPG franchise bought by Square Enix outside of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.