Now you're playing with privilege | This Week in Business

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This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check back every Friday for a new entry.

Annual reports are full of interesting facts companies aren't likely to advertise.

A couple months ago I poked through the Risk Factors in the annual reports of Electronic Arts, Take-Two, and Activision Blizzard and learned all kinds of neat stuff, like how piracy has no significant impact on the business, how companies are almost certainly using open-source software that technically requires their games to be given away for free, and how Activision Blizzard disagrees with its own leadership when it comes to climate change, nationalism, and the woke menace.

This week Nintendo released its own annual report, so I decided to give it the same treatment.

Sadly, Nintendo's Risk Factors were not terribly enlightening, more or less the usual grab bag of concerns any hardware manufacturer would have. However, elsewhere in the report Nintendo offered a few tidbits that might not be common knowledge, like its ownership stakes in Bandai Namco ($247 million), DeNA ($205 million), Square Enix ($4 million), Konami ($2 million), and Koei Tecmo (about $810,000).

And there's also a bit about the company's research and development efforts, which it poured $827 million into over the last fiscal year (and only slightly less the year before that).

QUOTE | "We also carry out research and development activities to examine the applicability of various technologies to the field of home entertainment including interfaces such as touch panels and sensors, networks such as wireless