Nintendo to buy Capcom

Power-rumouring overnight in Japan states Nintendo is poised to make an outright acquisition of Capcom.

This staggering news will see Nintendo entirely consume Capcom, taking full ownership of all development and publishing operations around the world. From what we can gather, the announcement will be made later this month, perhaps December 21 or 22.

In some respects, the validity of the gossip is glaringly obvious. Capcom seems to have lost all motivation for developing games for systems other than GameCube. It’s most lucrative franchise, Resident Evil, is, aside from a PlayStation 2 online tech demo, completely exclusive to Nintendo.

Furthermore, the only games to have been announced by Capcom of late have been for GameCube. You have to question the motives of a firm that will announce four brand new IPs, only to relegate them to the least profitable console on the market. And the question remains, where are Capcom’s PlayStation 2 and Xbox titles?

Some even commented that Capcom’s last PlayStation 2 AAA title, Auto Modelista, seemed to have been abandoned before it was properly completed.

Thus far, Product Number 03, Killer 7, Viewtiful Joe and Dead Phoenix are all confirmed as GameCube exclusive, as well as the massive Resident Evil series

As far as massive rumours go, we think that this is as on the money as it gets. It’s at least more credible than the “Nintendo to sue Sony having discovered it owned the term PlayStation, smashing SCE to pieces and releasing the Nintendo PlayStation” chatter that’s doing the rounds at the moment.

Whatever the Megaton announcement is, you’ll read about it here, as it breaks.