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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

Mostly, I believe Nintendo has about 20 years (not sure of the exact amount, a ridiculous number anyway) of operating costs in savings.

If they stopped selling anything tomorrow they’d still be good for a few decades.

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That sounds suspiciously like something a 134 year-old company would do to ensure its survival over the long term.

It’s a shame GE hasn’t managed to follow suit after 130 years.

Japan believes in lifetime employment and is thinking about what you'll be doing there in 20 years.

GE focuses on the quarter and DGAF if you're there in 2 years; ditto for technical initiatives, leadership, legal compliance, you name it.

Isn't that their normal cycle though? Produce a console that prints money, produce a console that bleeds money, repeat. Seems like their cash reserves keep them nimble enough to experiment and remain independent.

i don’t think they’ve had a console that bleeds money in the sense that playstations/xboxes have, though they’ve had quite a few flops over the past 20 years

Their only flop in the past 20 years was the Wii U. (The Gamecube is now over 20 years old.)

Previous poster was probably assuming, like I did, that the Virtual Boy was less than 20 years ago…

It wasn't a flop in my childhood. :'(

I don't think bleeding money is accurate for Nintendo. They are in the habitat of iterating on their previous consoles instead of just throwing everything out the window each time like some other companies, so even with their consoles that flopped it's not like the R&D money is just down the drain, and I'm sure labor-and-materials-wise they're making some kind of margin on the hardware itself.

Given the cycles for Nintendo consoles this sounds pretty reasonable particularly now that they have a single line of consoles with the Switch instead of console + handheld.

It's not like the Wii U sold a lot. Who knows if the Switch replacement won't be a Wii U. Who knows if there won't be two Wii Us in a row.

20 years in savings is astonishing.

A human with 20 years of savings would just be considered financially sound and (barely) safe to retire.

Yet a business with over 6,000 employees with the same financial security is exceptional.

Perhaps there’s something to learn here.

Businesses are not people who get old, can't keep working, and retire. Businesses can borrow significant sums of money, issue stock, come up with a new product that can transform their revenues overnight, etc.

I know what you're trying to say but this isn't a great comparison.

That a huge company can be more confident in its future cash flow than a single human.

Companies don't retire so this whole comparison doesn't make sense.

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