Hey all, i just went down a little 🧃 rabbit hole and wanted to share it with you guys.
So recently, an "activist" hedgefund called Oasis Management tried to do a hostile takeover of Kadokawa Corp, which is the parent company of From Software, makers of, most recently, Elden Ring. Apparently they said Kadokawas CEO left money on the table by having Bamco publish Elden Ring instead of doing it themselves. Fortunately, the companys (mostly Japanese, I assume) board backed the CEO and told Oasis to fuck off. You can read the story here.
This reeked of kikery, so I decided to do a little digging. According to wikipedia, Oasis Management "is a hedge fund management firm headquartered in Hong Kong... It is an activist investor, that has pushed for significant change at companies. In recent times, it has been focusing on Japanese firms." This is where I found out that this same hedge fund sent a letter to then Nintendo president Iwata saying what I wrote in the title, among other things. Read that article here.
Who could be running such a scumbag company you ask? A fella by the name of Seth Fischer who, wouldnt you know it, served in the Israeli Defense Force. Every. Single. Time.
Nintendo could make a profit selling their mainline Pokemon game for $8.
They only spent 13m on making the last one ( and it shows by its poor quality. A small studio could do much better with 13m, but not bloated Gamefreak. )
Full price tag, plus a $35 DLC. It seems costumers love getting milked extremely hard.
They do make DLC of things that were obviously supposed to be in the main full price game though. They enshittify everything.
Their consoles used to have easily replaceable batteries. Not anymore since the New 2DS XL's glued, inaccessible battery. The EU is forcing Nintendo to make a Switch 2 with a replaceable battery. Is Nintendo going to make that model avaliable everywhere? No. Not if they are not forced to.
The point is that enough people will buy a new model instead of paying a repair shop to dissassemble the console to change the battery. Consoles with degraded batteries also often end-up in a landfill or recycling center instead of the second-hand market ( a degraded battery bloating up will eventually crack the hardware beyond reasonable repair ). Win-win for Nintendo.