An unused portion of the NOA campus will soon be a car park for its next-door competition. http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/newsArt.cfm?artid=13761 Reports are coming in from Seattle that Microsoft has struck a deal with Nintendo of America to purchase a vacant 28-acre site that lies just across the street to the north of NOA's existing headquarters. The price of the sale will not be known until the deal closes and the records of the transaction become public toward the end of this month. Microsoft's immediate plans for the newly acquired land will be to use it as parking space to help alleviate crowding in nearby Microsoft parking garages.
Talking to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Perrin Kaplan, NOA VP of marketing and corporate affairs, said that the land "had been an unused asset for some time, and it just made good business sense for us to go ahead and sell it." She also said that the sale was unrelated to the upcoming move of Nintendo's PR departments to New York and San Francisco. In fact, NOA is planning to increase the number of employees in their Redmond headquarters due to expansion in other internal departments.
Nintendo still owns other properties in the Seattle area, so it still has room for physical expansion of its campus if the company feels it is necessary in the future.