Branching- Pepsi made phones, Nintendo had love hotels ^probs^ ^not^ and taxi services, Chinese companies make many stuff etc
It’s been a bit so I may botch some of the details, but back when they were just a playing card company, the youngish CEO went to the US and toured the offices of whoever the biggest playing card manufacturer was at that time. He noticed their offices weren’t that impressive and thought, “If we remain as a playing card company, this is our ceiling.” So he started branching out into a ton of weird unrelated businesses and video games happened to stick.
So basically thank Hoyle or whoever for having a shitty headquarters or we wouldn’t have Tears of the Kingdom.
Huge companies used to make a lot of stuff back in the golden age of capitalism. General electric was a big chemicals and plastics company for instance. It was just normal.
Nowadays, those mega-corporations make more money acting as a bank than they do selling stuff. They've just kept some product lines rolling because they're profitable and safe.
You couldn't just start a motorcycle company and be competitive against Yamaha. The specific expertise they have took decades to build, so why waste it by closing down those weird branches when they're still making money.
I ended up watching a video which was an in depth analysis of Japanese culture from pre-shogun era to modern day and they went into detail about how alot of these Japanese mega corporations started and got to the size they are now.
For reasons I'm still confused about it was titled "why we kill gods in jrpgs" but I recommend it even if you're not a gamer.
iirc Yamaha was making mechanical parts in WW2, and that department survived after the war by switching to making motorcycles
e:typo
