EA Founder Predicts MS Purchase of Nintendo

New site Xbox2News.com (via Evil Avatar) has up an interview with Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts and recent AIAS inductee. During the course of the interview, he is asked what he sees as the future course for Nintendo. His answer? "My magic eight ball says they will be acquired by Microsoft within five years." Tycho has commentary on the man's forcasting abilities in today's post.

Comments

The guy is an idiot

[EvilDonut]

He is a complete tool. Check out his response to this question:

With the next Xbox planned for release prior to Nintendo's and Sony's next systems, the cost of implementing a next-gen media format (HD-DVD or Blu-Ray) would be expensive. What do you think if Xbox 2 used the standard DVD format instead of high definition?

Personally, I don't think this is an important distinction. But maybe some early adopters will care about this and at least initially sway market share. HD will only be relevant in the long run if applications like football use it effectively to enable you to see more of the field. But I think the players are already on information overload as it is.

He doesn't know what HD-DVD or Bluray is! He doesn't understand the question!

With regards to his Nintendo prediction, apparently no-one's told him that Ninty has been profitable for 43 years straight, and have something like $8 billion in the bank. Why the hell would they want to sell to Microsoft?

American Purchase?

[redpawn]

Do you guys really think Nintendo, a traditional Japanese company would ever sell itself to an American company like Microsoft? I highly doubt it. Nintendo is a very proud company, unless they're completely dead I think they'll keep kicking. If they had to sell out I'd think they'd be more interested in giving assets to Sony than Microsoft. I'm sure Microsoft would love to acquire Nintendo, that would probably help them out a lot in the Japanese market. But coming from the founder of EA I put little to no stock in his .02.

Re:Nintendo is not for Sale

[hibiki_r]

Square has always worked on high expense, high reward games like Final Fantasy. Their average project's cost has always been among the highest in the industry. Just a couple of games that don't sell very well sends a company like that to their knees. Nintendo, on the other hand, makes as many "surefire" low budget games as EA. How much does it really cost to make warioware?. How much for porting a random Mario game to the latest console?. Even their big budget games are not even in teh same league as a Final Fantasy games as far as project costs go.

A Nintendo bankrupcy would only happen if all of their hardware divisions fail XBOX-in-Japan style. Nintendo has some serious brand problems, but it'd take unbelieveable incompetence to make them fail in 5 years.

Nintendo Ain't Goin' Nowhere

[Mitaphane]

I don't think the two companies are really comparable. Square was (and Square-Enix is) mostly a game studio for one niche genre of games with an occasional non-RPG game here and there. All they did was make the games. Before the merger Square had EA doing their distribution in the states.

Nintendo, on the other hand, does more than just make their games; they handle all the other aspects. They handle their own distribution. They have a tremendous amount of capital saved up for investing on game production. They make their own console and portable systems. And then there's Nintendo's other side markets like Pokemon cards and such.

Square made a huge gamble on borrowing all that money for the Honolulu studios that made FF: The Spirits Within. The odds didn't turn out in their favor and eventually they had to sell that studio. Mostly like they mergered with Square-Enix for a major capital boost.

Nintendo on the other hand would have to make a really huge investment to put them in the trouble that Square got in. And given Nintendo's past conservative tendencies I don't think they're going to do this anytime soon. They're going to keep playing it safe for quite sometime into future. And it's going to keep earning them money.