[Xantar]

And why exactly is that, Joeiss? I don't think the price of consoles would have dropped nearly as much these past two years if it hadn't been for Microsoft entering the market. Not to mention online gaming. At the beginning of the generation, Sony was pretty conservative about online gaming. Xbox Live forced them to change that.

As for the topic at hand, there's no way it's happening. Microsoft can make the offer, but Nintendo recently purchased a bunch of their own stock to keep a controlling share and avoid a hostile takeover. That doesn't sound like the behavior of a company that's about to merge. Besides that, Microsoft is going to lose several billion dollars on the Xbox by the end of this generation while Nintendo is going to be making profits off the GameCube. Why would Nintendo want to merge with Microsoft?

If anything, Nintendo would merge with Sony, but that's no more likely to happen, in my opinion.