Topic: What Games Do We Want?

@mav-i-am Well first of all capcom is valued at 1.5 billion. To buy a company like that first Nintendo has to buy up enough stock to be a majority holder (hostile takeover) and an ok from the Japanese government. Then they have to buy it out while keeping all of capcons contracts in place i.e. Put money into ongoing projects for other platforms. It would cost an insane amount of money assuming capcom wants a buy out. If not they can fight and cost them even more. Capcom is to big. Altus would have been a good fit but sega beat them to it.

Why would Nintendo buy out a company like Capcom? It's probably cheaper, better and makes more sense to build a long term relationship with them.

Back to the question though - I've given it some though and come up with a game I think would be perfectly suited to Switch. It's:

• A classic Sega game...
• One of the defining games on Dreamcast...
• Easily accessible with simple rules anyone can learn...
• Multiplayer...
• Not been ported to every format known to man...

...Chu Chu Rocket!

@faint I thought Nintendo rejected buying Atlus which is why Sega made the deal to buy them. Could be wrong though.

@FragRed I'm pretty sure sega jumped on it immediately and everything else was rumor and speculation.

@faint Well to be fair, Nintendo aren't known for splashing their money around when it comes to buying developers. They seems worryingly content on what they have.

@FragRed I agree. They are way to conservative. Mainly I just wanted to answer the previous posters question. If they had to buy a company in a realistic way I would suggest marvelous personaly.

Buy INTO is what I said.

@mav-i-am so just be stock holders? What would the get out of that? Capcoms stock fluctuates a lot and it still wouldn't mean Nintendo platforms get any more exclusives than they already do unless they became a majority holder like they did with rare. It still won't be worth it.

I'd like to see Nintendo apply the RPG genre to more of their IP. e.g.

Kirby RPG in the style of Mario and Luigi
Star fox SRPG
Splatoon meets world ends with you gameplay

And so on

I think we've been well served with Mario RPG/adventures through recent entries in the paper Mario and Mario and luigi series. Time to give them a break in my opinion.

@mav-i-am for all we know Nintendo may actually have some capcom stock and that's why we keep getting monster hunter as an exclusive. Not saying that's the case but we wouldn't even know if it was.

@faint By becoming major share holders (which may not require a large % - who knows??) you gain a voice that has to be heard, which means we are more likely to get all Capcom games on Nintendo platforms.

Anything RPG really. I'm pumped about Xenoblade 2, and Octopath Travler. RPG, JRPG, SRPG, etc. Just give me an engaging story with good characters and I'm happy to empty my wallet. Also, a need for speed game would be nice.

@faint I'd be down for a breath of fire game with breath of the wild art style.

@mav-i-am the company still acts independently. Do you read Nintendo shareholders meetings. They definitely don't listen to them.

Yes I know that, which is why I said you get a voice.

@mav-i-am remember rare sold themselves to Microsoft while Nintendo still had a majority stock share. I doubt they wanted that.

@mav-i-am Nintendo is a huge company. Can't their CEO just walk into capcom and be heard anyway?

@mav-i-am but Nintendo fans don't buy capcom games on home consoles. That's why we don't get them.

@Dokkaebi breath of the wildfire?

Nobody wanted that! ...from what I remember, I don't think Nintendo ever had a majority share of Rare - the Stamper brothers (founders) maintained a controlling stake of the company until the $350m-ish sale to Microsoft - but much of the creative talent decided against following the money and instead formed their own company (Free Radical Design) ...fast-forward to today: Free Radical, despite some success with TimeSplitters, are no more - another ex-Rare start-up, Playtonic Games, don't look they're going to hit they're going to hit the heights looking at the luke-warm reviews Yooka-Laylee has been getting - and Microsoft's return on their investment has been...a collection of polished-up, but old, N64 games - and Viva Piñata? :/ ...the whole thing has been a bit of a disaster from a gaming perspective (although I'm sure the Stamper brothers were smiling all the way to the bank!)

Microsoft bought a name - but failed to secure the talent (eg. David "Dr." Doak, the creative mastermind behind GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, didn't stay with Rare after Microsoft's acquisition) ..that's like buying Kojima Productions, but not securing Hideo Kojima! ...pointless!

People should be careful what they wish for when they say 'company x' should purchase 'company y' - doesn't always end well!

And Grabbed by The Ghoulies. Don't forget Grabbed by the Ghoulies! Or It's Mr Pants!

I think for Microsoft at least part of the appeal of grabbing Rare was that it sabotaged the GameCube line up. Maybe not the launch line up but there were a few games being developed at Rare that would have been important exclusives for the GameCube in years 2 and 3. Those became games that either never made it out at all or eventually limped out onto the 360 long after the embers had burnt low.

To be fair - Rare's games in the later N64 era did feel a bit stale and they probably couldn't have carried on being so prolific as production costs rose with the newer consoles (whether under Nintendo's ownership or Microsoft's).

Anyway - to the point - buying a mid sized independent developer/publisher like Capcom doesn't actually get you very much. You'd get a lot of legacy IPs like MegaMan and Resident Evil but Capcom as it stands only has the development resources to make a handful of new AAA games a year. It wouldn't be worth enough to justify the risk.

You might swing Resident Evil 8 to the Switch and you might get a MegaMan revival (that could sell well on Switch but wouldn't sell to Switch to the non-converted) but there are much easier and cheaper ways to get those games on your console if you really want them. Capcom already releases its biggest game series (Monster Hunter) exclusively on 3DS anyway.

Buying one of the big 3 Western publishers might be more interesting but the business case would never stack up - their games have vast budgets and that only works when they're releasing on all of the formats where they can reasonably sell high quantities.