Nintendo is just two bad generations of hardware from being vulnerable enough to sell itself (IMO.)
They had only $4.3 billion cash on hand as of 2018 (surely more by now thanks to the success and maturation of the Switch.) But Microsoft just dropped a little less than double that on ZeniMax.
I wish Nintendo were in such a rock-solid place where I'd feel confident about them existing forever like Disney but I don't think that's ever been the case.
Edit- The people downvoting me have apparently already forgotten about the Wii U. Imagine if they had two such systems in a row, without the DS/3DS line as a profitable fallback. Such are the possibilities of the future.
When Nintendo's doing well, they're doing great, and everyone seems to forget the bad times. The GameCube era wasn't much better, but at least the GameCube and GBA were profitable/break even from their launches, as opposed to the Wii U and especially 3DS post-Ambassador price cut.
Would be interested in a discussion or any kind of rebuttal from others who are actually familiar with Nintendo's financial history.
To be clear: Nintendo as a company operated a loss from 2012-2015. An incompetent CEO could easily exacerbate that into a death spiral. Don't take Nintendo for granted, is all I'm saying.
It's a possibility but pivoting to software isn't easy by any stretch, and it wasn't something Sega should have even been able to do (financially.) The only reason it happened is because Sega's biggest debtor, Isao Okawa, forgave that debt on his deathbed.
In a slightly altered timeline where Okawa didn't do this, Sega would have went under and its IP's would have been sold piecemeal to the highest bidders.
Nintendo has famously large cash reserves rich and a quick Internet search suggests they have about 7 billion in cash. Things would have to go very badly for them to go out of business, especially as they can presumably issue new stock to help raise money for a pivot in some sort of doomsday scenario.
Over $4 billion cash on hand is an insane amount of money for such a small company. Nintendo is only about 4,000 employees worldwide, so that cash will go a very long way.
You're getting downvoted because you are talking from a place of objectivity. From my understanding (outside of the Wii U), aren't they the only company not losing money on consoles - even now? Why would you bring up "selling themselves" when talking about a company founded in 1889? None of the competitors existed that long - using your logic, Sony and Microsoft might as well count their last days.
"It eventually became one of the most prominent figures in today's video game industry, being the world's largest video game company by revenue"
I wish Nintendo would just take some ideas from other companies in the areas of online play and incorporate them into their own products. My friends and I would love to play Mario Kart on Switch with each other, but we can't be bothered to setup an additional voice chat solution and use the dumb lobby system. We also would like to play Mario Party online, but Mario Party Switch doesn't even offer its main game modes online, just a handful of mini games.
It's frustrating because there's a lot of untapped potential.
They had only $4.3 billion cash on hand as of 2018 (surely more by now thanks to the success and maturation of the Switch.) But Microsoft just dropped a little less than double that on ZeniMax.
I wish Nintendo were in such a rock-solid place where I'd feel confident about them existing forever like Disney but I don't think that's ever been the case.
Edit- The people downvoting me have apparently already forgotten about the Wii U. Imagine if they had two such systems in a row, without the DS/3DS line as a profitable fallback. Such are the possibilities of the future.
When Nintendo's doing well, they're doing great, and everyone seems to forget the bad times. The GameCube era wasn't much better, but at least the GameCube and GBA were profitable/break even from their launches, as opposed to the Wii U and especially 3DS post-Ambassador price cut.
Would be interested in a discussion or any kind of rebuttal from others who are actually familiar with Nintendo's financial history.
To be clear: Nintendo as a company operated a loss from 2012-2015. An incompetent CEO could easily exacerbate that into a death spiral. Don't take Nintendo for granted, is all I'm saying.