Nintendo sells out to Microsoft

Thought this would get your attention


Nintendo to sell land to Microsoft

28-acre parcel for possible future use

By TODD BISHOP
P-I REPORTER
Microsoft Corp. plans to buy another large property near its Redmond headquarters, continuing to expand its massive footprint in its hometown.
Nintendo Co. said Tuesday that it reached a deal to sell Microsoft a vacant 28-acre parcel across from Nintendo's North American headquarters. The agreement confirms widespread assumptions that Microsoft would buy the land.
Microsoft will keep the land in reserve for possible development in the future and use it to help alleviate a parking shortage in the meantime, said Lou Gellos, a company spokesman. The parking garages at the company's adjacent RedWest campus are often filled to capacity.
The sale price wasn't immediately disclosed. The purchase is slated to close in mid-July, said Perrin Kaplan, vice president of marketing and corporate affairs for Nintendo of America. The King County Assessor lists an appraised value of $23 million for the site, at 148th Avenue Northeast and Northeast 51st Street.
"It's been an unused asset for some time, and it just made good business sense for us to go ahead and sell it," Kaplan said.
Kaplan said the decision to sell the land was unrelated to Nintendo's plans to move sales and marketing operations from Redmond to the Silicon Valley and Manhattan, N.Y. She reiterated that Nintendo of America will remain headquartered in Redmond.
Citing Nintendo's strong sales, Kaplan said the total employee count at the headquarters will actually increase, due to expansion in information systems, product testing and distribution.
That local growth, to take place over approximately the next year, will be "significant for Nintendo," Kaplan said, declining to give specific projections for employment growth. Nintendo still has room for expansion, including possible new development, on its existing Redmond property and elsewhere in the Seattle region, she said.
Nintendo's Wii game console, released in November, has experienced high consumer demand, selling more units in recent months than either Microsoft's Xbox 360 or Sony's PlayStation 3. The Nintendo DS hand-held has also done well.
Microsoft has previously acquired large properties in the vicinity of its Redmond campus from Eddie Bauer, Spacelabs Medical, Safeco and others.
"There has been one big deal after another for the last several years along that strip and the common thread is Microsoft," said Kip Spencer, co-founder of Seattle-based officespace.com and chief strategy officer with NuMark Office Interiors.
As of March 1, Microsoft reported that it owned 8.5 million square feet of space in the region and leased 2.9 million more. Most of Microsoft's operations in the region are in Redmond.
In the commercial real estate business, there's a risk when one company owns and leases so much space, because the market can ebb and flow strongly with that company's fortunes. For example, the real estate market south of Seattle struggled at times in decades past when The Boeing Co. laid off workers and shed large amounts of space.
Microsoft's large footprint in Redmond is "a great thing provided the company continues to grow and prosper," Spencer said.
The company added more than 10,000 employees worldwide in fiscal 2006, the largest annual increase in its history. Microsoft hasn't yet released employment numbers for fiscal 2007, which ended June 30.
A large part of the 2006 growth took place in the company's online operations, where Microsoft is trying to catch up to Google, Yahoo and others. Those operations are centered at the RedWest campus, adjacent to the land Microsoft is acquiring.
City officials say the vacant Nintendo site was slated to accommodate about 550,000 square feet of office space under a previous Nintendo plan. Microsoft's Gellos said the company could create room for about 2,000 workers if it eventually builds on the new site.
However, that would be under the current limits set out by the Bellevue Redmond Overlake Transportation Study. The site would be able to handle considerably more if the development cap were relaxed, city Deputy Planning Director Jim Roberts said in May.
Separately, Microsoft is in the midst of a massive redevelopment of its Redmond campus. It said last year that it would add 14 buildings with 3.1 million square feet by 2009. The first new building will be a new Microsoft Research headquarters, under construction on 148th Avenue Northeast, a few blocks south of the Nintendo property.
Nearby, Microsoft has begun excavation for a huge parking garage, which will be able to accommodate nearly 5,000 cars.
And in Bellevue, the company announced plans in April to lease more than 1.3 million square feet in two office projects under development, which will eventually create room for 4,000 more employees.



http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/322256_msftnintendo04.html

 

First the land.......then the entire company. VIVA LA Wii60

 

Business is business, i don't see this as the forerunner of anything big.

 

ditto

 

Jesus cristo! I thought MS was going to buy nintendo...

 

I doubt they could afford Nintendo. Not with the warchest Nintendo has tucked away.

 

microsoft already failed at a buy out of nintendo back when they were doing poorly in the home console market. Trying that again now when they're rolling in the $$ over the Wii & DS is just a freaking joke. So keep dreaming.

This purely was just buisness over a lot of land they've done nothing with over the years.

 

In theory they could, but it would be a fucking waste of money since nintendo stockholders would ask for a completely insane price, and MS execs are already pissed at the Xbox's 4 billion deficit, so they aint going to like that kind of deal...

Anyway, I wonder why they wanted to buy nintendo (which at the time had no valuable properties aside from the GBA) and not SEGA which had a developer powerhouse at the time, and since they were broke it was actually cheap to buy them.

 

MS stock holders wouldn't allow the purchase. It would be more than $4billion, that's for sure.

 

Dude thats what I just said, and the 4 billions are just from the Xbox.

Obviously nintendo is worth much more than that, like 30 billions or more right now if you take a look at the size of their market share...

On the other hand, for sony it would actually be a great opportunity to buy it and destroy the DS so the PSP can reign supreme.

Thats the only way I see the PSP winning this portable war:lol:

 

No one will beat Nintendo in the handheld war, but that's not the point. Competition forces innovation and experimentation and improves our gaming experience ultimately. I feel DS games are way overpriced right now and if the PSP gained market share then it would suit me. We'd never have seen $20 greatest hits Cube games had Sony not started theirs.

More competition I say! Woargh!

 

The XBOX is funded with the change bill gates finds under his couch.

 

They said the same about nintendo in the console front, and it got trashed by the 8bit era "loser" SEGA with the Genesis and then all remaining hopes of taking back the market were crushed by the newcomer sony and the PSX.

Never say never...

 

The SNES was the worldwide leader, so how can you say it got "trashed"?

 

The Genesis had 63% of the US market in 93, reason why I said "trashed" and not defeated, since nintendo got the upper hand after that.

 

That still doesn't make a damn bit of sense (like most of what you say). You're still only looking at one market, and even then you aren't looking at final results, but rather results that were project only a year or two after the SNES was released. The SNES was in no way trashed by the Genesis.

 

Dude I never said Snes, I said nintendo. My point is that nintendo once was the console leader by far more than today in the portable market, yet two generations after that almost everything was gone.

Learn to read, it helps...

 

Yeah, Shadowlayer is right. Nintendo led the market for a while, then Sega interrupted with the Genesis/MD, but Nintendo came back again in the end of the 16-bit generation show with a lead, however, it was too late as the N64 and Sony PS1 went head to head and Sony quickly claimed the lead and took off with it.

The portable market on the other hand.. we all know how that went and is still going.

 

Exactly:nod:

 

Well, first of all I did read your post (you should feel honored because most of the time I skip your posts) and you said "Nintendo got trashed by Sega" which was in no way, shape, or form true. When talking about Nintendo in the 16-bit era, most people are referring to the SNES... so if you weren't talking about the SNES, then what the hell were you talking about? The NES? Quite honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if you were.

No, I'm afraid not. Yeah, the Genesis did provide some competition, but Sega by no means "trashed" Nintendo. No one's arguing the point that the PSX stomped everything in it's way, and I never said it didn't.