Xbox chief Phil Spencer believed a Nintendo merger would have been his ‘career moment’

Microsoft Gaming chief Phil Spencer wanted to acquire Nintendo so bad, he considered it a “career moment.” One of the leaked documents from the FTC v. Microsoft case was an email Spencer sent to the company’s Chief Marketing Officers Chris Capossela and Takeshi Numoto in 2020. The executive talked about how Nintendo was the prime asset for the tech giant in gaming, which is Microsoft’s best bet for consumer relevance. He was confident that if there was an American company capable of acquiring Nintendo, it was Microsoft. However, Nintendo was apparently sitting on a “big pile of cash” that made it unlikely to go looking for buyers. 

Spencer added that Nintendo had a board of directors that had not pushed for increases in market growth in ages. He explained that it might change in the future, though, as one of Microsoft’s board of directors — investment company ValueAct Capital — had been “heavily acquiring” Nintendo shares and had been “fully supportive” of an acquisition if the opportunity arose. 

Microsoft has a long history of trying to acquire the Japanese gaming giant. When Bloomberg published an in-depth oral account of how the Xbox came to be for …read more