Nintendo has made a surprising, and very interesting acquisition.
In a press release, Nintendo Co. Ltd. revealed that they have fully acquired Florida based game studio Shiver Entertainment. Nintendo said this in the press release:
“Nintendo will acquire 100% of the outstanding shares of Shiver and make it a wholly owned subsidiary. By welcoming Shiver’s experienced and accomplished development team, Nintendo aims to secure high-level resources for porting and developing software titles.
Going forward, even after it becomes a part of the Nintendo group, Shiver’s focus will remain the same, continuing commissions that port and develop software for multiple platforms including Nintendo Switch.”
Their press release states that Shiver recently made the Nintendo Switch ports of Hogwarts Legacy and Mortal Kombat 1. But that creates a somewhat misleading impression to fans that they aren’t very good at making ports.
Prior to those titles, the company also worked on Scribblenauts Showdown, Scribblenatus Mega Pack, and Mortal Kombat 11. MobyGames has these titles listed on their entry for the company, but since the company was founded around 2012, they likely have done even more uncredited work for other games too.
While it’s interesting that Nintendo acquired an entire studio to make ports of games, as some fans will point out, there are other studios with better reputations for this sort of thing, such as Feral Interactive, Panic Button, Saber Interactive, and Virtuos.
Some fans have gone datamining to see if there’s more to this purchase than meets the eye. As CartridgeGames points out on Twitter, Shiver CEO John Schappert worked with Doug Bowser when both were still at Electronic Arts. John also founded EA Orlando, FKA EA Tiburon, who now makes EA’s sports games. So the theory is that this was all set up so that Nintendo has their own studio to port those sports games.
But if Doug Bowser did put in a good word for his old co-worker, the decision to acquire was made by Nintendo in Japan, and not Nintendo of America where Doug is CEO. It’s just as likely that Nintendo picked up Shiver because they happened to be up for sale. And they could get a good deal for it from the ailing Embracer, which is itself set to separate into three companies.
But it’s not as mysterious why Nintendo would allow Shiver to keep working on ports for other platforms. They would want a studio who has knowhow of how other platforms work so that, for example, if they get a game made for the PlayStation 5, such as Stellar Blade, or the Xbox Series X|S, such as Palworld (humor me here), those are easier to make.
And there’s no hiding that this is being set up in connection to the Switch 2, but we likely won’t see if Nintendo made a good or bad call here until when we’re deep into that console’s lifespan.
One last note if you were curious: the last studio Nintendo acquired was Next Level Games in 2021, after working with them for nearly 17 years on Luigi’s Mansion, Mario Strikers, and the Wii version of Punch-Out. Nintendo clearly sees the need to add on studios like Sony and Microsoft. Unlike them, though, it seems they’re being careful to ramp up, and that certainly looks like the smart play.
