I remember the report that when Microsoft initially planned to enter the console space they wanted to recruit Miyamoto with 10x salary. The proposal was outright rejected because he cannot do anything meaningful without the team and culture he had been building over decades. In the creative industry, teams and cultures are (almost) everything.
Nintendo will unlikely keep its team and culture when it's acquired by some random US big techs. Japan and US just have so different corporate cultures at their fundamental level. Think about a hypothetical scenario; another big economical crisis is looming and Satya mandated Nintendo to cut 5~10% of its HQ employees. Would Nintendo keep its unique culture after its first ever lay-off? I don't think so.
I have a (now retired) relative who spent a majority of his career as a high-level MSFT exec, and he knew a lot of the OG Xbox guys. As a kid in the early 2000s who grew up with Nintendo consoles, I asked him over the years more than once why there was no effort to purchase Nintendo.
His answer every time was a simple "the Japanese corporate culture and the American corporate culture have differences in ways that money simply cannot overcome"
As much as I'd love to be able to play Mario or Zelda in 4k 60fps, or play FZero or Smash Brothers over Xbox Live, it's just not gonna happen.
>As much as I'd love to be able to play Mario or Zelda in 4k 60fps
You can do this on PC with emulators if you want to. It's probably not "legal" but if you have already paid for a copy of the game there isn't much harm in it.
Nintendo will unlikely keep its team and culture when it's acquired by some random US big techs. Japan and US just have so different corporate cultures at their fundamental level. Think about a hypothetical scenario; another big economical crisis is looming and Satya mandated Nintendo to cut 5~10% of its HQ employees. Would Nintendo keep its unique culture after its first ever lay-off? I don't think so.