Nintendo Isn’t Looking To Acquire Studios Right Now

Although Sony and Microsoft recent­ly made head­lines in Jan­u­ary for their acqui­si­tions of Bungie and Activi­sion Bliz­zard, Nin­ten­do has been qui­et on the top­ic. In the com­pa­ny’s lat­est investor Q&A, Nin­ten­do pres­i­dent Shuntaro Furukawa addressed the mat­ter, say­ing Nin­ten­do with rather pri­or­i­tize their invest­ments into the devel­op­ers it already owns–as a need to retain the “Nin­ten­do DNA” through­out these studios.

“I real­ly have a hard time imag­in­ing which of the big ones they could even be inter­est­ed in buy­ing,” Furukawa said of the cur­rent buy­out race, via Bloomberg. “Nin­ten­do will always stay Nin­ten­do. The com­pa­ny has always relied on first-par­ty games, and I don’t see any rea­son why they should change. 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 does work with out­side studios–last year’s Metroid Dread was devel­oped by an out­side stu­dio (Mer­cury Steam)–but it con­tin­ues to invest more heav­i­ly in its own stu­dios. Last year the com­pa­ny announced that almost $870 mil­lion would be used to sup­port its stu­dios, and would con­sid­er acqui­si­tions if that devel­op­er could offer tech­nol­o­gy and exper­tise that Nin­ten­do would­n’t find too cost­ly to repli­cate by itself.

Nin­ten­do’s last pur­chase of stu­dio was in Jan­u­ary 2021, when Next Lev­el Games was acquired. Con­sid­er­ing that Next Lev­el had col­lab­o­rat­ed with Nin­ten­do for many years before it was pur­chased, it like­ly had already had that DNA Nin­ten­do was look­ing for.