Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the worst analyst of them all? All signs point to Michael Pachter, as he’s at it again with his Wii U flip-flopping. Pachter has been notoriously hard on Nintendo in particular when it comes to analyzing the company’s strategies; he’s gone from stating he thinks the Wii U will be sold out during the holiday season and when that didn’t happen, he stated the Wii U was a failure. It has lead to a lot grief for Nintendo fans, as many try and reason that the Wii U is not next-gen and not capable of playing next-gen games.
In his latest episode of Pach-Attack on GameTrailers.com, Michael Pachter took two viewer questions directly related to Nintendo. The first deals with expanding the eShop outside of countries it is already available in:
PDantas: “Mr.Pachter, do you think Nintendo is expanding their eShop services for countries outside the US anytime soon? I’m in Brazil and I fear I won’t be able to download the new Wind Waker HD when it comes out.”
Michael Pachter : “Yeah I think so, I think Nintendo is very late to the party with the eShop. But so far what I’ve seen it actually works quite well, you know, I think in typical Nintendo fashion they did it right, they just did it late. So I think it’s their intention that any place you can download their games, they’re happy to sell them to you.”
The second question is far more telling, as Pachter admits he has no idea how do decipher Nintendo’s release schedule or what they could be planning because of it. He goes on to admit that despite the strategy being undecipherable by him, he would never question it because of how strong of software support the company has:
Marc42: “What do you think of Nintendo re-releasing Wind Waker? No mention of Mario, Metroid etc. Creative troubles?”
Michael Pachter: “Urm, I think Nintendo is an enigma wrapped up in a question mark. I have no idea what motivates Nintendo to release the games they release. I think you can safely assume that if Nintendo thinks they can make money re-releasing a game, they’re going to re-release the game. I certainly wouldn’t diss them at all for bringing back Wind Waker, and I would not rule out that because today there is no mention of any other game they’re not going to do that.
I think that pretty much anything that is Mario or Zelda is under Miyamoto’s control and I think that Miyamoto is given complete freedom to pick and choose what he wants to work on, what he wants his studios to work on. I think that he decided that Wind Waker would just look great in HD. The demos we saw it looks pretty great in HD. It’s a big big franchise and I think they will sell a lot of units. The only constraint to selling units of Wind Waker is the amount of Wii Us out there. So far not very many, but in time there is going to be 10, 15, 25 million and I when there are they are going to get a very high attach rate.
That audience is super loyal to the Zelda franchise, of course they’re also loyal to Mario but you’re going to get a new Mario title, probably more of these retro titles later on in the Wii U’s life cycle, but again I’m at a complete loss to explain what motivates Nintendo to do anything, they have their own method, it has worked for them for a long time. I would never ever question their software strategy, I think they do a great job on software, I consistently question their hardware strategy but not software, I think they know what they’re doing.”
This is pretty telling that Michael Pachter ultimately believes the Wii U will be a success. His doom and gloom predictions for the hardware side of things rely purely on Nintendo’s release schedule for software, which Pachter freely admits he’s unable to predict because of the nature of Miyamoto and Nintendo’s creative freedom with several of its franchises. As many of you have stated, the answer here is that once the great line-up of games we know are in the pipeworks become available, the sales for the Wii U will follow.
[via Nintendo Enthusiast]
