Topic: Something big is going on at Nintendo.

On a related note, Nintendo's new R&D building was completed recently.

Located just down the street from HQ, it cost about $200m to build and will house 1,500 workers at a working space 4x larger than the old one.

Edit: Found a Google Maps image from when it was being built. HQ is below to the right.
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=34.972553,+135.754441&num=...

Retro hiring new people makes sense since they moved to a much larger office recently.

They needed a larger building to store all of the cash that the 3DS prints.

Just sounds like Nintendo is Strengthening its base.

They're taking names to make games that will kick donkey.

cue montage using this song as background music
_{Please watch the profanity — TBD}

my god its beautiful.

Their stocks are worth more than Sony's, not the entire companies

Well, the market cap is higher. The investment community uses this figure to determine a company's size, as opposed to sales or total asset figures.

So you're saying that Facebook was once bigger than Google? Yeah no

I don't think that ever happened. Google's market cap is ~400 billion. Facebook's is ~100.

For some reason this reminds me of when I used to play the Age of Empires series. I utilized the turtle strategy and walled everything off to build my army to maximum capacity and potential before coming out late in the game to wipe others out in full force. >:]

That's what it seems like here. Nintendo is expanding internally, building up teams and resources before unleashing everything they've got later. Let's hope it pays off.

If the wii u becomes popular, this lousy start will be nothing more than a faded memory.

It's not so much "coincidence" as the first full work/news week of January. Last week most people were busy celebrating the new year. Companies don't like hiring new people until after the books close month end, same for advertising for new jobs. Why pay employees Christmas bonuses when you can just wait to hire them Jan 1st?

So I suppose it can kind of sort of been seen as "coincidence", but it's more ike a lot of news coming out after 2 weeks of Christmas and New Years celebrating and offices being closed and people being on vacation. If all this news came out some random week in Oct or Apr then I'ld be more inclined towards making something out of it.

They're expanding nearly all their studios to cope with developing for both the 3DS and Wii U.these past two years probably taught them they need to pick up the slack even more so than previous generations.

They know that need more working force. It's good. The games are coming.

It's probably to hurry up and create a new home console and sweep Wii U under the rug.

That would actually be the WORST thing Nintendo could do. "Oh, sorry everyone who just dropped $300+ on the Wii U, we're done with that. Buy THIS instead!" And before you say anything, people have bought the Wii U.

Agreed. Sega basically did the same thing and look what happened to them.

I agree, even with the 3DS selling like hotcakes, most developers (especially western) seem much more interested in the Iphone/Ipad market.

Wait, people aren't taking this market cap too seriously, are they?

It must be noted that this is a speculative figure, based upon investment trends and prospects. In Nintendo's case, the market cap increased significantly, largely due to a couple of factors. The obvious, encouraging reason is China opening it's doors to foreign consoles. Clearly this benefits Nintendo's bottom line.

The other is more cynical and possibly equally significant (if not more so). That's because many analysts are convinced that there is a high probability Wii U's dubious outlook will force Nintendo to coalesce to board demands and embrace smartphone software development and/or licensing.

This is largely a case of investors looking at the lucrative potential of Nintendo IP being prostituted to the largest markets.