Game analyst Michael Pachter can’t seem to make up his mind about the Wii U. First he was very dismissive of the new Nintendo console, saying that the “Wii U won’t work“, then he was positive when Nintendo announced the price and release date, saying he was impressed with first party games and that he thinks the console will sell out until March 2013.
Now he’s back in “not impressed” mode, it seems. In a recent interview, Pachter flat out said that he’s “not a fan of the console”, and he went a step further and simply compared the Wii U to the Nintendo DS. Pachter said:
“I’m not a fan of the console. Essentially I look at the GamePad and the television, the two screens, and I see a DS that’s disaggregated. It’s very similar to playing a DS game. The difference is, with the DS your line of sight is on both screens.
It’s easy to toggle back and forth. With the GamePad on the Wii U you have to look back and forth, and that’s not natural.”
Pachter goes on saying that Nintendo will do well with the new controller and create innovative games, but third parties will fail on the console.
He compares it to the DS, where he doesn’t believe there was a single third party publisher who did well on the console. All the great games were from Nintendo. He also says that once Nintendo sells 10 million Wii Us, sales are going to drop drastically.
“They sold 90 million Wiis; it’s certainly less than 90 million hardcore fans. I would guess it’s between seven and ten million, and it could be 20 million but they don’t all have $350.
When the hardcore fans are satisfied, I think sales are going to drop precipitously because I don’t think the thing is priced competitively with what most people think is a comparable console, Xbox 360 or PS3.”
He doesn’t believe the Wii U is novel enough to be the most expensive of the three consoles on the market (the other two being the PS3 and Xbox 360). He compares it to the original Wii console, which was very novel and was also the cheapest of the three when they launched.
Pachter’s current opinions are quite contrary to something he said just two weeks ago, where he claimed he would “buy a Wii U just to play Bayonetta 2“. Tune in next week, when Michael Pachter once again praises Nintendo and the Wii U out of the blue.
