Xenoblade dev Monolith Soft is now fully owned by Nintendo, but since it hasn't released a game on a different platform in nearly 20 years, that probably doesn't mean much.

A soft monoliththe developer behind the Xenoblade Chronicles series and major studio support on it Zelda: Breath of the Wild now fully owned Nintendo.

While it has been around for almost two and a half decades now, Monolith Soft has mostly made a name for itself over the past 10 years or so with the Xenoblade Chronicles series, and for good reason. They're solid, beefy RPGs that connect in a lot of fun ways, and the developer has clearly proven itself to be a strong studio over the years by offering support on a wide range of titles like Breath of the Wild, Animal Crossing: New Horizonsand the three Splatoon games. Now, as reported by Automatonit appears that Monolith Soft is wholly owned by Nintendo, a move that is likely to make a difference in the grand scheme of things, but one that obviously makes sense.

Nintendo owns 96% of Monolith Soft's shares since 2011, the last 4% is symbolically held by the companies' founders, except as shown on Monolith Soft's website, the manufacturer Mario is now completely alone. In many cases a single wholly owned company can be a big deal, but Monolith hasn't even released a game on a non-Nintendo platform since 2006 with Xenosaga Episode 3 on the PS2. So, yeah, you can probably expect things to stay the same at both Nintendo and Monolith Soft.

Right now it's unclear if Monolith has anything completely original in the works – what we do know, though, is that Xenoblade Chronicles X is finally coming to the Nintendo Switch March next yeara title fans have been wanting to come to the stage for years now. It will also likely be one of the last big titles to come to the Switch, considering the launch of the Switch 2, or whatever it's called, will be out definitely next year.