Xenoblade Chronicles developer Monolith Soft is now a wholly-owned subsidy of Nintendo.
First spotted by Automaton Media, Nintendo recently acquired the final outstanding shares of Monolith Soft. This comes 17 years after the company first purchased 80% of the shares from Bandai Namco.
Prior to the full share purchase, Nintendo owned 96% percent of the shares. The first 80% came in 2007 while another 16% was purchased from Bandai Namco in 2011. The outstanding 4% were owned by company founders Hirohide Sugiura, Tetsuya Takahashi and Yasuyuki Honne.
It’s unclear when this transaction took place. However, as of February 2024, Sugiura, Takahashi, and Honne still owned 4% of the company. That means it clearly happened within the last handful of months.
As far as the future goes, it’s not expected that anything will change. Nintendo has had a controlling stake in the studio for years, and will likely continue on business as usual. What it means, though, is that for the first time since the company was founded in 1999, the original founders will have no official stake in it.
In addition to work on the Xenoblade Chronicles franchise, Monolith has provided support development to games such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
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They should buy Square Enix out next. Monolith could remake Xenogears and Geno and Mallow could finally show up in Smash no problem and Super Mario RPG 2 can happen. Especially if Sony buys Kadokawa they’ll own Acquire and that hurts the Mario & Luigi games.
Nintendo please buy Square Enix next with Sony buying Kadokawa. Make a cel shaded JRPG or open world adventure game with Hiromu Arakawa, Chrono Trigger remake that looks and plays like Dragon Quest XI, XenoGears remake, and let Nomura make Verum Rex/Versus XIII.
Nintendo owns a percent of Bandai Namco they should fully buy them out next and fire Harada as well as other idiots.
If they buy Square they need to fire the current leadership and the censorship ethics board just fire a ton of those people and keep Nomura and the Dragon Quest team let Monolith oversee all games from Square moving forward.