Games

Microsoft is bigger.

Nintendo's market cap is about $56.7 billion.

Microsoft's market cap is $2.44 trillion, with $111 billion worth of cash (not equity, cash) in the bank.

Microsoft is 43 times bigger than Nintendo. They can pay for Nintendo with only cash, if they desire.

These trillion-dollar players are an order of magnitude larger than anyone around them. They can do what they want, same as how Apple ($2.8 trillion) can easily buy Disney ($150.5 billion) if they wished.

This isn't an exact science, but you can use market cap to ballpark these things and get an idea of how much an acquisition would cost. For example, Twitter had a market cap of $31 billion in August 2022, and Elon bought it a few months later for $44 billion. That's a 1.4x increase, so applying the same math buying all of Disney would "only" cost about $214 billion - which both Apple and Microsoft (and Google) could do. Nintendo would cost about $80 billion, which Microsoft could do without even taking out a loan.

The issue isn't necessarily the price; it's the regulators.