Nintendo's Scale Economy

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console R&D is actually not a scale economy, because you don't have the benefit of all the people that bought your old console to amortize the cost. And so I think that's something they've sort of woken up to with the Switch. The next big console that Nintendo comes out with is a Switch and is super Switch compatible. Then they start entering the scale economy's game where they can make the biggest best hardware if they can get more people paying a sort of subscription.

You may think you know the Nintendo story: a plumber named Mario, a princess named Zelda… and didn’t they buy the Seattle Mariners at some point? We thought we knew it too. And then we started researching and were blown away.

The lovable Disney-like Nintendo that we know today is a 130 year-old a playing card company (i.e. gambling), forged in the shadowy world of the Yakuza and shaped by a four-generation cycle of bitter family betrayal. And its unlikely transformation into a global multi-billion dollar media monopoly was led by an iron-fisted patriarch who — amazingly — never played a video game in his life! Get ready for one of our favorite stories Acquired has ever told — we couldn’t make this one up if we tried!

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