Sure, we may be generalizing for the purpose of the arguments, but what I meant to say is that outright buying companies has no guarantee of having you keep the talent or the same work quality the company used to have.
You're right, there is no guarantee. But if you're willing to put in the legwork to get the staff on-board with such an arrangement, it works out pretty damn well and mitigates/removes that pitfall. You can't just decide to do it and make it happen (which is why it doesn't work for most companies, I might add), it involves knowing the people involved really well and upwards of a year of talking and negotiating and getting ALL of the people involved on-side with the idea.
What happened with Monolith Soft shows very clearly that Nintendo is willing to put that kind of effort into any acquisition they take part in. It also shows in the information we have about the acquisition of Mobiclip (now NERD), the stock-trade business alliance with DeNA, and most recently the acquisition of JESNET (now Nintendo Sales Co.).
The industry is going with partnerships more nowadays because companies want the freedom to do what they want to make. In the case of Monolith, it worked, but look at Rare, or all the companies that EA bought to later kill, or the companies that Microsoft bought to farm out their I.P's and had to end up releasing the games also on Windows to manage the costs.
Comparing corporations like they have completely analogous business practices and agendas really doesn't do much to make a case.
The argument is Nintendo doesn't NEED to buy a company to make great games with them. They published Bayo 2, they helped Bomberman Switch happen.
It's not about need, it's about consistent availability of the talent and a maximization of profit. Sub-contracting is more expensive than having people on payroll, so you make more per game if you own a studio, it's just typically considered a higher risk. But the risk-reward ratio is more manageable for Nintendo, when they have gaps in their release schedule to fill that 3rd-parties can't be assed to.
As an example of these principles in action, look no further than Nintendo poaching a huge chunk of Hudson Soft staff, buying out Dentsu's ownership portion of ND Cube and basically making it a studio for those former Hudson employees.
It happened because:
- Nintendo had a strong foundational relationship with the president of Hudson Soft and its management staff (who in turn had a good relationship with their employees that made it easy to pitch the idea of signing on with Nintendo)
- Nintendo wanted them to keep making Mario Party games and...
- Despite all the money they spent reworking ND Cube to be the studio it became, it would have still been cheaper that working a deal with Konami to have those employees work on Mario Party games or having to pay an independent studio that may have formed from their departure, which has its own risks of the talent dissipating to other companies instead
If it were cheaper to do it another way, it would have happened another way. But it didn't. And that speaks to the value earned by having in-house studio talent, particularly those with a defined pedigree. Nintendo put in the legwork and made it happen, because there was value in doing so.
I'm not sure what you mean really. He was pretty much just repeating what Iwata used to say about the subject.
Then you're misremembering Iwata's statements.
