143
Phil Spencer: "getting [acquiring] Nintendo would be a career moment for me"; Nintendo's future "exists off of their own hardware"
(www.resetera.com)
Archive link: https://archive.ph/NF2r0
At some point, getting Nintendo would be a career moment and I honestly believe a good move for both companies. It's just taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off of their own hardware. A long time.... :-)
The ActiBlizz merger needs to be shot down and Microsoft Games needs to be forced to split off from Microsoft. This tactic of "Make all the money in one sector, then use that unlimited money to invade another sector, force small businesses out by operating at a loss, and then enshittifying the entire sector to a state worse than it was originally" has to stop - across all sectors.
If you can't survive in your own sector on your own merits without money from Daddy Corpo, you deserve to die.
I also hate that Spencer talks like "sitting on a big pile of cash" instead of gambling it on the market is fucking stupid. Classic "NOW NOW NOW" American capitalism.
I get called a Sony fanboy for calling out Microsoft for being terrible for gaming. I haven’t owned a Nintendo device since N64, but I have nothing bad to say about them. They make great games.
It’s weird calling for one mega corp to be split up while supporting another mega corp that owns more than the first. Everyone needs a reality check if they think any mega corp doesn’t want the same thing.
In the context of gaming, Sony and Microsoft couldn’t be more different. I can get over Sony’s terrible store backend or refund policies. I know how they work, how to avoid pitfalls, etc. at the end of the day, they make the better games that I like to play and have shown over the course of thirty years to support gaming first.
No no... it's the part that Sony owns a headphone company, and a TV company, and their first product was a rice cooker.
The point was that they enter a space using funds from one of their other arms to strongarm away competition and become a conglomerate that owns and operates a huge percentage of people's lives and product purchases leaving almost no breathing room for other companies to ever enter.
It's not about refund policy or their games it's about the subsidized products they can only afford by min/maxing other economic spaces they control
Nintendo was founded in the 1800s as a playing card company. To some extend every manufacturer started with something else. You're misrepresenting my point. Sony entered the market and competed based on actual merit. They have grown their own in-house talent, in-house IPs, and technology just like Nintendo. Microsoft almost threw in the towel in 2013. There recent moves scream Embrace, Extend, Extinguish where they don't have to worry about pesky things like making good games, but can force gamers to pay them monthly for whatever they feel like putting out, or just let third parties do the work and use their power to force them into whatever pricing Microsoft wants. People thinking GamePass is great should brush up on their history of what Microsoft does when they get the upper hand. I say this as a someone who uses a ton of Microsoft Products outside of gaming.
Sony and Nintendo are both terrible, hypocritical companies in their own right. That by no means absolves Microsoft of being who they are, and the pro-consumer tactic Xbox has employed for the past 5 or 6 years is definitely a calculated move and the result of them falling hard after the Don Mattrick era, but to say that Microsoft (and by that I assume you mean Xbox) is terrible for gaming is a bad take. The gaming landscape is better because Xbox exists. Competition and choice empower the consumer. If you think Sony wouldn't be an even shittier company without the competition Xbox provides, you really don't understand how these avaricious corporate conglomerates operate.
Funny thing being that the only reason SONY is in gaming was to screw Nintendo. They had a hardware partnership that fell apart because SONY was putting the thumbscrews to Nintendo over revenue sharing. Nintendo said, you’re not the only one who can provide what we need, and dumped them. PlayStation was the direct result.
That's a incredibly biased way of saying a business deal feel through, Nintendo went to a competitor, and Sony decided to prove Nintendo made the wrong choice and stay in the market
Nintendo broke their contract with Sony. I think it's obvious that they messed that one up. What could have been right? Competition is good.
If you're sitting on cash, you're guaranteed to lose money to inflation. If you invest it wisely, you have a good chance of beating inflation. Even in personal finance, it's very stupid to sit on a big pile of cash; everything above and beyond an emergency fund or savings for a short-term goal should be invested.
Honestly even the idea of an emergency fund, I mean accounting dorks say things like "save six months salary in an accessible, liquid form".
Does anybody really do that? I mean for a middle-class well-educated dual-income household that's probably close to 100k, which we were all recently reminded the limit for bank account insurance.
If you own your home doesn't it make more sense to have a secured line of credit set for emergencies and then ride as close to the wire as you feel comfortable?
Your emergency fund is usually recommended to be 3-6 months of expenses, not salary...though I guess for plenty of people, even at high salaries, that may be the same number, but then you'll never have savings anyway. Really your emergency fund is for however much risk you can tolerate, like if you end up unemployed for 3-6 months, but your emergency fund is for things other than just unemployment, like sudden medical expenses or replacing a water heater. If you're comfortable with a line of credit on your home being your emergency fund, go for it. There's some risk to that, but there's different kinds of risk to everything.
Yes, because otherwise how the fuck can I afford to move apartments when my landlord raises the price by a thousand dollars a month. But also I have no assets so it's my entire savings and I can't put it anywhere because I need it within a year.
So yeah some of us are fucked and the idea that a middle class household would make 100k in 6 months means you have no touch on reality for real wages for lots of people.
Sorry, forgot this was an international community. $100k CAD. So $75k USD. We've the same 100k bank-insurance limit here, but its $100k CAD.
Either way, I know plenty of people who make near $200k of household income and are still fucked because they didn't get into the housing market in time before the door slammed shut (average home in Greater Toronto is now well north of a $million, even with our stupid-expensive interest rates). Like, teachers and realtors make $90k CAD after a few years of experience these days, but that doesn't accomplish much when rent keeps jumping and nobody can afford to buy. Basically the only reason everybody isn't eating cat-food is they're either in a pre-rent-deregulation unit or they bought before it all hit the fan.
Also, side-note: the traditional concept of "middle class" is not the modern expansive definition of "basically everybody who doesn't own either a private jet or live in a cardboard box". That is, somebody who pays rent and has a job that doesn't require grad-school used to be considered "working class". It's just that for some dumb reason we all collectively decided that "working class" was something to be embarrassed about.
I'm assuming that "big pile of cash" is their emergency fund - Spencer implies as much when he says that it serves as an impediment to buying them out.
There's some use for an emergency fund, but since businesses this size have steady streams of revenue, they usually only want to sit on tons of cash when they can't find anything better to invest it in. Microsoft went on acquisition sprees, but other companies might buy back shares to return that excess cash to investors.
That would mean Minecraft could actually be released for more than Android and Windows again. That game was on every platform then Bedrock came out and it's on 2. They even said Mac and Linux versions were coming after release and it's been years. A C++ version of the game is ideal. It runs faster, it plays better, they also integrated a marketplace and overall I like bedrock but they only did it to keep a monopoly on gaming.
That said, Game Pass is uniquely tied to Windows at this point and has very little ability to have the same protections on Mac or Linux. Windows is the only OS that can hard lock you away from your files. For better or worse. Game Pass is a neat system but also has major downfalls.