Nintendo Isn’t Changing Its Investment Plans In Light Of Recent Acquisitions

If you’ve been watching the videogame landscape in the past month, you might have noticed that companies seem to be constantly trying to acquire independent studios making great games. 

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. Take-Two Interactive bought Zynga (the company behind FarmVille, Words With Friends) for $12.7 billion. 

The $12.7billion acquisition was only eight days old when Microsoft made an announcement that it had spent a record-breaking $68.7bn to purchase Activision Blizzard. This was in addition to the $27bn Microsoft paid for World of Warcraft publisher Call of Duty and Overwatch. PlayStation announced last week that it would be buying Bungie for $3.6bn, which is the same studio that made Halo and Destiny. 

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. 

The publication reports that Furukawa said last year, “Nintendo plans to invest approximately $870million in strengthening its game production, with a primary focus 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]

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