"The Quiet Giant" | TP&C | Episode 104

Think Pieces and Conversations — Episode 104: The Quiet Giant

While Xbox and PlayStation raced to become larger—buying studios, increasing budgets, expanding services, and chasing the next industry-defining blockbuster—Nintendo continued moving differently.

Quietly.

Deliberately.

Almost unnoticed beneath the noise of acquisitions, layoffs, live-service gambles, and escalating development costs, Nintendo kept strengthening the same foundation it had spent decades building: exclusive hardware, recognizable characters, creative gameplay, and intellectual property that grows more valuable with every generation.

In The Quiet Giant, I examine why becoming a bigger corporation does not necessarily create better games—and why Nintendo’s restraint may be its greatest competitive advantage.

This conversation explores the financial crisis facing AAA gaming, the danger of oversized projects, why uncontrolled expansion eventually leads to cancellations and layoffs, and how Xbox and PlayStation may have overlooked the most successful blueprint in the industry.

Nintendo did not refuse to grow. It simply understood that growth should strengthen the identity of the company—not bury it beneath more spending, more studios, and more corporate weight.

Xbox and PlayStation got bigger.

Nintendo got smarter.

And while everyone else was competing to make the most noise, the quiet giant continued building an empire.

Hosted by @8leftearth.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to another episode of Think Pieces and Conversations. For the people that's just listening to the audio of this, I have something that I'm showing on the screen right now. Um, it's the stock price of a certain company, and I need y'all to understand this, right? Microsoft, any company, any company, you can think of any company. This is what they care about is that fucking stock price, okay? Let me tell you something, man. Is bigger better? Bigger is not better. Sony group. Their stock price is right here as well. All they care about is that number being green, the number getting bigger. Corporations are only rewarded when scale is increased, right? At the end of a CEO's employment, or however the the however long they stay with the company, they go and they go take their resume and they go to such and such company, such and such massive Fortune 500 company, and they say, Yo, look what I did for Microsoft over the course of X amount of years while I was there, they went up 56%, or whatever it is, right? It for the consumers out there we get too emotional. When I say we, I mean the consumers because I'm also a consumer, but I'm not emotional, right? We get emotional when we see layoffs, we get emotional when we see things happening with our favorite game companies, but we never look at it objectively, we never look at it like yo, what are they actually trying to do? What are they doing? Right? It's so much going on in the gaming industry today. I just came back from the gym and I was just thinking about this, man, and I was just thinking about the rumored 400 million that Gears of What E Day's budget is, and it really ain't make no sense, bro. When I think about the movie industry, and I'm thinking about certain breakaway movies that's getting hella praise, like obsession. I haven't seen obsession. I know, I haven't seen obsession. They this movie's getting hella praise with the minimalist budget, and then they overdeliver on the profit, and they make hundreds of millions of dollars. There's nobody in these companies, there's nobody doing business with these companies that want to negotiate less. Everybody wants bigger, everybody wants better, everybody wants no, everybody don't want better, everybody just wants bigger and stops focusing on the better. Better is making sure the customer is as satisfied as possible because they are the ones giving you your money. Did y'all know? Did y'all know this, right? You know when a company lays people off. When a company lays people off, did you know that the stock price tends to go up? The reason why the stock price tends to go up is because that's more money in their pocket, that's more free capital, thus that increases the stock price. When people get unemployed, stock price goes up. You didn't know that, did you? Back to my favorite game, most anticipated game right now, next to Marvel Tok on Gears of War E Day. It's a rumor that it's 400 million. I kind of touched up on this game being 400 million. Let me ask y'all a question: why should any single game need that kind of capital? Why would any game, one game, not even a course of a series of games, one game, need that kind of capital to create it, to build it, to put it together? Nobody has ever was like, yo, man, let's make less, let's let's let's use less for more, let's use less to build more, let's sell off to Microsoft, let's buy into Microsoft. Microsoft wants to buy us, cool. Let's set our price to 400 billion and let Microsoft buy us. At the end of the day, these companies have to account for what they bought you, why they bought you, how much money you brought back after they bought you. This is why these companies are getting sent off, sent back to be independent. Uh very few closed down or none closed down during the Xbox reset announcement, the Xbox reset email that Ashley Sharma sent, right? Those things didn't happen necessarily, but there was a cutting of 1600 employees, 3200 by the end of 2027. So there are things happening because people wanted bigger and suffered for it. The companies wanted bigger and suffered for it. Nobody has thought about being better yet until Asher, obviously. What is better, right? Better is allocating your money for the right things, um, not having an overinflated development staff, not having fourteen fucking layers of management. Something that Asha Sharma discussed in her email. That's absolutely ridiculous. Nobody is trying to do work under 14 layers of management. You imagine how many emails gotta get sent, and how many of those emails you gotta wait for a response? That didn't make sense. That was a DEI company. That shit, that structure was taken over by DEI, that structure was taken over by people that did not want to work, people that wanted to do less for more. In order for a company to regain its fucking kingdom, its prestige, a prestige that the Xbox and both Xbox and PlayStation are starting to lose their prestige because of the things that they've bought that they now can't account for. I'm not saying that on the Xbox side that Gears of War E Day is something that can't be accounted for. Because I think this game is gonna do more than shit, is it's gonna exceed my expectations. But why put a 400 million dollar bet on one fucking game? Isn't that risky? Yes, it's risky in business. You gotta take risks, right? I'm gonna assume something made sense for this game to be worth 400 million. So I did a little bit of research, tiny bit of research, right? And there's a lot of things that go into these games, man. There's a lot of bets being made, there's a lot of cross-marketing that's gonna happen, there's a lot of microtransactions that's gonna happen, there's a lot of selling off of the license to put a character in the different companies that's gonna go out. So I think Gears of War is gonna make its money back, but I don't think a highly paid developer is a problem. I know I discuss people getting laid off. That's not what the problem really is, bro. The problem is when things are inflated, team size, development time. How long is it gonna take for you to create this game? Oh, how much you need per year to create this game? Okay, gears of war, 400 million, five years? Okay, alright, alright. Uh-huh, okay, cool. How much y'all got left? 112 million? Okay, we're gonna do that. We're gonna use maybe that 112 or how much left is in that budget for Gears of War. I don't think they spent the whole budget. Whatever is left for that game, I think they'll take wisely, they'll be wise with it. But my thing is this, right? Nobody is talking about one game company that has done it right since day one. Nobody is talking about the one game company that has done it right since day one. You got PlayStation in the gutter, they're doing they're going back and forth with physical copies. Xbox is watching them, Xbox went up on their price with the system. Cool. The heat got got off them because of what PlayStation is doing. GTA doesn't want their uh representation on the PlayStation logo because it's bad publicity, so they took off the art of GTA being on the PlayStation logo somewhere or something like that. There's a lot of things happening, but you know who's in the background just watching everybody fuck up, huh? The person that is in the background watching everybody fuck up. You know who this is? You got an audio. I know you you guys got audio, right? Right now, I got a logo of Nintendo up. I got a logo of Nintendo up. Nobody, the Xbox or the PlayStation, they have never, I could tell they have not studied Nintendo, they haven't studied them, and if they did, they they didn't take their heed, they didn't learn and apply, they just watched Nintendo just in the background selling Pokemon, selling uh selling Metroid for the 45th time in a different form in a different game. Nintendo Nintendo keeps doing it. Nintendo is is the quiet giant in the background watching Xbox and PlayStation compete for market share. And then when you look at Nintendo, they have a market share that can't be touched in no way, shape, or form by neither company. Both companies have to call Nintendo, yo, um, y'all got that super smash brothers. Okay, um, I um I think we could put one of our characters in there if you don't mind. I think we could put Master Chief in there. Do you guys want Master Chief? Um, uh, Xbox, do we want Master Chief? We like we like Master Chief, we do. We'll call you back. We'll call you back. Um, um, um Master Chief is cool. We like him. He sells a lot, he sold a lot of games for y'all. You know, we we like him, but um, we got some other guys that's calling us right now. We'll we'll get you back, we'll hit you back. PlayStation hit him. Yo, damn. Um I got the lady from I got Kratos. Do y'all do y'all want Kratos, Nintendo? Do we want Kratos? Hmm. I don't know, man. Um Super Smash Brothers Ultimate Sold XXY XXY and we don't know, man. Um we'll call you back. We'll call you back. That is what Nintendo has built for itself. Nintendo has built such a strong empire. While Xbox and PlayStation is just focused on being bigger, focused on this one game that'll potentially save the entire company, which unfortunately Gears of War Eday has that type of pressure on his back, it's gotta save pretty much the entire company, or save at least the franchise itself of Gears of War. Everything falls on Gears Eday, right? A lot falls on Gears E Day. If Gears E Day fails, which I don't think it will, a lot of shakeups is gonna happen. Right, Microsoft expanded itself so much buying Activision, so much buying Bethesda, so much buying Xenemax that we don't even know who Xbox is no more. Xbox had to fucking shed its skin and show what it was about and show that it can survive in this new era, show the the old faces that really built up the Xbox, the hey the the Master Chiefs, the Marcus Phoenixes. It had to go back in order to move forward. Nintendo has never had that issue. Nintendo took part of my entire childhood, Nintendo was a part of it. As a grown man now, I don't have a Nintendo Switch, but some of the biggest points in my life, some of the most pivotal uh moments in my life, the things that I remember the most, you having a Game Boy Advance, I'm having a Game Boy Color, I'm having the cartridges, I'm playing with the cartridges, I'm letting people borrow my game, I'm playing other games that other people got. You got the cartridges, you blowing on the Xbox 60 the uh Nintendo 64 cartridge, all that is nostalgic, all that is permanently imprinted in my brain. The physical copy was mastered and is still mastered by Nintendo. Nintendo focused on being isolationist, and if they called you because they want your character, then they called you for their game. You don't call them. Nintendo started with Link, started with Mario, bought Sonic, had Samus, bought Metroid. Uh no, they didn't buy Metroid, they created Metroid. You know what they did with them three big IPs, man. All they did was keep focusing on the IP, keep making different games, keep strengthening the IPs, and made those people, those characters, Mario, Luigi, Samus, Link. They made them into giants, untouchable giants. Something that the PlayStation and the Xbox wasn't watching enough. They didn't pay attention enough. They didn't pay attention to how calculated the Nintendo has been this entire time. They have complete dominance over the handheld market, they have the most noticeable IPs in the world, Pokemon. The most notable IPs in the world. It doesn't matter how many times Mario does Super Mario Galaxy, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter how many Mario tennises come out. You know what people are gonna do? People are gonna buy it because you can't get it nowhere else. They did exclusive gaming the best. They did exclusive gaming the best. You know where you don't hear about people getting fired at the most? Nintendo. You know what Nintendo did, right? That made people mad a couple years ago. That's when they did the Mario Kart World or whatever that new Mario Kart is. It was eighty dollars the first day, right? It was eighty dollars the first day. You know what people did? People complained for two days. When it came out, they went and bought that shit. They shut the fuck up and bought that motherfucker. Where else are you gonna find uh Mario? You're not gonna find it on the PlayStation, you're not gonna find it on the Xbox. You want Mario? Spend this $80, spend this $80, and here you go. They did exclusivity right. They did if you wanna see him, you gotta come here. They did it right the first time and never switched up. Xbox wants to do it now, right? They want to do it now, which is cool. PlayStation been kind of been on the exclusive thing. You're not gonna see uh Solid Snake on the Xbox, actually. Solid Snake ended up being on the Xbox, he did. Um those two companies just did everything wrong. It's just I never heard of Nintendo buying fucking this big old IP from here. The biggest thing they bought was Sony. I mean uh Sega, they bought Sonic. That's the biggest thing Nintendo bought was Sonic. Right? This makes me sad, bro. Let's talk about Sony a little bit, man. What they bought. We talked about Xbox and what they bought, man. X Sony bought fucking bungee, right? And this is some of the saddest things ever because Bungie was bought with too much money. They was bought for 3.6 billion dollars. They was bought for three point six billion dollars. Xbox, the layoffs exposed inefficiency that are already accumulated during the expansion. Play station with that purchase of Mungee is gonna follow the same fucking path, bro. They balled, they they they followed the same path. They bought they bought a company, they was like, yo, man, we need your games, right? We need your games, bro. You bought a company for 3.6 billion, but Halo, Master Chief is on his last fucking leg. Actually, bungee doesn't even make Halo no more. Oops, you guys replaced Master Chief with Destiny, you replaced Halo with Destiny. You thought Halo was smaller than Destiny, or Halo is just not a part of the modern times anymore, and destiny is a part of the modern times, which I understand, but you paid too much fucking money for them guys, bro. You paid too much money for them guys, bro. Look at this kotaku.com Sony records new 560 million. Dollar loss on Bungie. Like, what? You know why I've never heard Nintendo lose? When when was the last time have you seen Nintendo do have all this shit go on on the media? Yo, Nintendo is sold off these guys, yo, Nintendo can't. Nintendo is untouchable. Nintendo is the quiet king, the quiet giant of the gaming industry. Especially during these times, right? Sony later acknowledged that Bungie results had fallen below the expectations held at a time of acquisition and recorded an impairment against the business. PlayStation also continue restructuring resources around Bungie and his portfolio. They had to. Man, big expectations for man. Unfortunately, Marathon did not hit the mark. Marathon cost these motherfuckers 300 400 million. Matter of fact, I gotta look this up. Huh? How much did Marathon cost to make bungee? Marathon's budget was over 200 million dollars. A brand new IP, by the way. Brand new IP, by the way. Brand new IP. Yes, the game was well made, but there's a lot of factors they did not consider. They didn't consider they did not consider the casual factor, they did not consider the lifespan factor. How is this game gonna keep going and keep playing? How are we gonna keep keep this this this uh IP up? How are we gonna keep every single day less and less players play marathon? You know what's happening with Nintendo? Nintendo slowly rises and plateaus rises again, plateaus. You never gonna see these niggas dip. You're never gonna see them dip. Because they have an identity they have kept for decades. Anything else that can add to the identity, make the game stronger, make the licenses stronger, make the IP stronger, they go and they go buy it, they go and they go keep it, they go and they go make another game for it, they go make another Animal Crossing, they go make another Zelda, they go make another Pokemon, they go make another Mario, they go make another Super Smash Bros. Oh, you guys want to play in our game Super Smash Bros. That millions of people are gonna play and keep playing. Your character's gonna keep being seen. You wanna get in our game, we'll call you. We'll call you. Every game made by the same IP that they started with, super when Mario came out, fucking 1990, whatever. They keep making a new game, the IP gets stronger. The IP gives people the reason to buy your fucking hardware. Xbox had that idea early in this game. Yo, who we got? We got Master Chief. Master Chief ain't going to fucking PlayStation. Master Chief ain't going to nah. He not going over there. They had the right idea, but they didn't trust the fucking process. PlayStation has the right idea. They had they still have Kratos. They still have Kratos, but Kratos made the mistake of going to PC. Kratos touched a piece of PC. The IP of God of War touched other systems. Oh, you want to see this character? Oh, you could buy the other system. You ain't gotta buy this one. Nintendo should have been studied harder by these two other companies, they should have been studied better. We're not gonna even gonna talk about Steam. I'm just gonna talk about the consoles. I just want to talk about the console kings. Nintendo does expand, right? Even though I said they're isolationists, they do expand, but it expands outward from its characters, games, and hardware. It does not need to purchase a new identity every few years. The Xbox had to go to a Marcus Phoenix at some point after Master Chief. I don't even know who else Xbox has. Those are the only two games that Xbox those are the two flagships. Nintendo got 19 flagships, and I'm just throwing a number out there. They got a whole bunch of niggas they could just pick from. Yo, we're gonna make a new game, a new Pokemon. This is our 37th Pokemon game. Yo, we're gonna make we're gonna make another Pokemon. We're gonna make that shit open world. Alright, cool, whatever. That's gonna sell another 100 million. Yo, we're gonna put out that's gonna sell another 100 million. Yo, Zelda coming back out. Alright, we're gonna do open world zelda. Hundred 100 million. They doing less for more. They keep doing less for more. The the the the graphics on a nintendo switch is not the greatest shit ever. The the graphics on a nintendo switch. Hold on, let me look at this up. Nintendo Switch specs. Like, they keep Nintendo Switch specs. Two specs. They're giving you less for more. You're focused really on the game and how well it is. You're focused on playing uh firebrand or fire emblem, or whatever the fuck it's called, right? Custom processor made by Navide. Okay, so it's it's not telling me what exactly what it's for. What it would yo the Nintendo Switch is not as powerful as a PlayStation. The Nintendo Switch is not as powerful as the Xbox Series X. It's not, right? Their games are fun. There was a brief moment when I had a Nintendo Switch. Really brief. I had a brief time with a Nintendo Switch. And I forgot what it's called. I think it's called Dragon Something. Dragon Something, right? It's one of them old RPG games, and they had like a uh like a remastered version, right? I played this shit, shit was fun as hell. It was a RPG, I'm not even an RPG guy, fun as hell, right? It's just I didn't play the Nintendo enough because I didn't care about the games, but the games were very fun. I played Metroid, the the newest Metroid on that shit. That shit was lit. But my friends were on other systems, and Nintendo focuses on a a uh younger audience. It wasn't for me, I don't really care about playing Zelda, Pokemon Kirby, Ammo Cross, and Mario. I don't care about playing those games. But when I did play them on a Nintendo Switch, they were fun. They were fun. They were fun, bro. Man, yo, like I know we living in a time where this high cost RAM is going up. Uh the next systems are gonna be thousands of dollars. It's guaranteed the PlayStation 6 will be over a thousand dollars. That's a low ball. The new Xbox will be over a thousand dollars because of what's going on. I'm not saying Nintendo was immune to these specs, to these uh prices going up. They wasn't immune. There was a time when people were mad at Nintendo's Switch 2's price going up. That's fine, right? The integrated models that the Nintendo Switch had, it had more control over the customer relationship pricing, distribution, and franchise directly, franchise identity than a publisher that depends heavily on acquisitions or third party content, right? When you focused on third party content, you have less control, you have less say so. Yeah, you might you pay the check, yo. I need y'all to make this game, and hopefully, y'all get over the budget and end up in the black. Hopefully, but you're not hands-on. Nintendo is hands-on with all these flagship characters they got, bro. The only thing they can do is win. That's it, right? I played a game on the Nintendo, it was an old Nintendo DS game, I think, or a Nintendo Advanced game. It was a RPG fucking Mario game, right? The Mario game was an RPG game, and it was probably the best RPG I've ever played in my life. I can't even remember the name of it, bro, but it was amazing. It was like, yo, this was great, this was awesome. Oh my god. Then you got Mario tennis. I had a great time with that when I was younger. Oh my god. Mario did man why wasn't Marcus and Dom put into a fighting game? Nah, nah, nah. I know people laughing at that, but why wasn't Marcus and Dom put into a fighting game? Why wasn't Marcus and Dom put into a strategy puzzle game? Why wasn't Marcus and Dom put into a horror game? Why wasn't Marcus and Dom put into why wasn't their IP fucking just yo, we making every different type of game with these niggas, bro? Why won't why don't we have an extraction shooter for gears? These two companies, Xbox and PlayStation, wasn't studying the king. They wasn't studying Nintendo, they wasn't studying them. They just, yo, let's just keep getting bigger. Yo, let's just keep buying shit. Right? They just keep buying shit. Yo, them guys got a Call of Duty. Oh my god, we gotta get dumb. We gotta get dumb. You're buying Call of Duty 17 games later when the entire franchise people are tired of because they keep making the same game with slightly different changes every year. Every year is another fucking Call of Duty, you can't skip it. It felt like yesterday that Black Ops 7 came out. Them boys got Modern Warfare coming in two months. They put out all kinds of gameplay footage on the internet. Yo, man, look at this new way to play Modern Warfare. You know what I do on Twitter? Fucking roll right past it. I skip it. I don't care. Nobody cares no more. Right? Nobody cares, bro. Why wasn't Master Chip? Why wasn't Marcus and Dom on a phone game? Why wasn't Marcus and Dom put into a fucking uh what they call that shit? There was a there was a a damn Candy Crush like game they could have made with Marcus and Dom. They didn't have the creativity. Nintendo, even though they have the same IPs, they focused on the player every time they focus on the player. Yo, we are putting out Fire Emblem. These niggas is on the 17th Fire Emblem. You know what people do when Fire Emblem comes out? They buy that motherfucker, they buy it every time. They buy it every time, bro. Every spin-off that I just spoke about with Marcus and Dom, of course, there is a chance that they wouldn't succeed. But my part my my my my point was with those things is that if you making a little Candy Crush game with Marcus and Dom, that budget for that little fucking game is way smaller than you making a whole new Gears of War. That mobile game you could have made with Marcus and Dom would have been way smaller than another Gears of War. That low budget tactical strategy game with Marcus and Dom, not really Gears Tactics, because Gears Tactics look like a big budget, but you could have made something a little smaller than that, like a Final Fantasy tactics type game. Way less graphics, put that shit on the uh on the phone or something. I don't know. That budget would have been way less than Gears Either, right? PlayStation, you could have done that shit with Kratos too. Kratos got a couple games, but you could have done more with Kratos. You could have done more with him. My problem is mostly with Xbox, but they're both fucking up bad. One 400 million dollar project Gears E Day rumored to be should not carry the entire burden of keeping an IP relevant. I know Gears E Day isn't gonna fail. I know it's not gonna fail, but there is a chance that it can fail. There is a chance it can really fuck up. And guess what? If this game fails, there is a really good chance that you're not seeing another Gears. This is worst case scenario. My thing is Nintendo would have never put themselves in this position. They would have never put themselves in position. Yo, them niggas, what they want another Metroid Prime? Um, what's that shit called, bro? That was on the uh Dreamcast. What was that? Was that Metroid Prime? Whatever that Metroid was that was 3D. Yo, man, we wanna make a new one that's Metroid, a new 3D Metroid, but we want to make other Metroid games so we could have a better budget to make that game, right? So we're gonna make 17 fucking Metroid Primes, and then in 2029, we're gonna make that big one. Alright. Even if that shit fails, these other games gave us a really good budget. We're gonna still be in the black when we really put our time into that fucking game. That's why Nintendo is genius. Right? Make sure you like, comment, subscribe to the channel, bro. Like listen, bro. I want people to I want these gaming companies to really survive, but I'm on PC now, so it doesn't really affect me if they drop, but it does affect the games that get put out. These guys still have IPs that I want to play. And unless Xbox and PlayStation start really studying this giant of what Nintendo has done, this empire, it has an empire with solid steel foundations that can't be broken. You ain't never dropping Nintendo, it's not it's never gonna fall. While Xbox and PlayStation is focused on the stock price, Nintendo is focusing on strengthening its IP every year, every single year it's strengthening his IP, strengthening its reputation, strengthening its player base, strengthening its fucking Yelp reviews when people buy these games. Yo, man, that Kirby game, oh my god, it was amazing, yo. That Zelda game, oh my god, it's amazing. There's people outside of Nintendo that don't even know who Zelda is, right? They all they know is Call of Duty and fucking Master Chief. They never played a Zelda since the first Zelda. They ever step foot and play the new Zelda, they're gonna be like, yo, this is amazing. Oh my god. Nintendo wants you to be like this. You play our game, you're you we got you. It's over. You love it. That's it. You love it. Make sure you like, comment, subscribe to the channel, man. I don't even know what my point was in this shit, bro. I just kept rambling. Um, I hope you got the point though. Um Gears E Day, the beta drops August 6th. A lot rides on this beta. A lot. I'll see you then. Make sure you follow my podcast on every single podcast site, every single podcast distributor, you will find think, pieces, and conversations. Um, I had to get this off my chest, man. Like, you gotta play smart in this game. In this game of business, especially with these corporations, a lot of moves are being made. And if these companies would have played smarter from the beginning, if these companies, Xbox and PlayStation, would have played way smarter from the beginning and just tucked their pride and just learn from them guys the the golden ticket Nintendo, we wouldn't be having all this commotion these days. I'm out of here.