2022 continues to be a big year for mergers and acquisitions in video games, and now Nintendo is taking part. The company has announced it is buying its longtime collaborator SRD Co. Ltd.
You may not know SRD by name, but the company has been working with Nintendo for almost 40 years. In a major development, SRD came up with the idea for Mario to be able to jump higher in the original Super Mario Bros. Most recently, SRD worked on Game Builder Garage, Ring Fit Adventure, and 1-2 Switch with Nintendo.
Nintendo is buying 100% of the company's outstanding shares for an undisclosed fee. SRD was founded in January 1979 and has worked with Nintendo since then on a multitude of games.
Nintendo said buying SRD will help "strengthen the management base" of SRD and to help "secure the availability of software development resources for Nintendo." The Mario maker also said buying SRD will help in "facilitating an anticipated improvement in software development efficiency."
Nintendo said the buyout will have only a "minor effect" on Nintendo's overall business results.
In 2021, Nintendo purchased another longtime collaborator, Next Level Games, the makers of the Mario Strikers series who are now preparing to release Mario Strikers: Battle League in June.
The announcement of the buyout of SRD comes not long after Nintendo said it didn't plan to buy many new studios, but there are always exceptions.
Outside of Nintendo, 2022 has already seen Take-Two propose to buy Zynga for $12.7 billion and Microsoft put forth a $68.7 billion bid for Activision Blizzard.