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Nintendo still can’t admit Wii U is a failure, says analyst
While Nintendo is still a household name and one of the most successful developers of all time, one analyst says the Japanese game company failed with the release of its most recent console, the Wii U, and still can’t admit it.
Michael Pachter is a financial analyst who previously hosted Pach-Attack, a web series on GameTrailers that focused on the gaming industry from a financial perspective. Pachter has long been critical of Nintendo Co Ltd’s release of the Wii U.
In a 2013 video, Pachter said, “This past quarter, [the Wii U] sold 160,000 units, which is pretty sad.”
In the video, Pachter noted that the company was banking on profit from first-party game titles rather than console sales, but the “core Nintendo fanboy” was not a large enough audience to drive the Wii U’s success.
“I think that the casual gamer that drove Wii sales up to 100 million,” Pachter said; “That gamer is not buying a Wii U at 349 bucks no matter what.”
“Still in denial”
Pachter recently told Game Informer that Nintendo still can’t admit the Wii U is a failure despite its mediocre performance on the market compared to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, and especially in comparison to the previous Wii system.
“I think that they are not a particularly introspective bunch,” Pachter said. “I think that they are still in denial about the Wii U failure. You keep seeing this stat so we’re up 82 percent – yeah, 40,000 units went to 70,000 units. Who cares? You’re still trailing the other guys by a mile.”
“They need a new console that’s competitive with Xbox One and PlayStation 4,” he added. “If Xbox can sell at $349 Nintendo could make it and sell for $249. They won’t because they still live in that old console world where they think they need to make a profit on the hardware. That means if they make a competitive console it would be more expensive.”
Pachter blamed several mistakes on Nintendo’s part for the lack of success for the Wii U, including confusing consumers by not making it clearer that the Wii U was a new console rather than a Wii add-on, as well as the company’s poor performance in drawing in third-party developers to the system.
The Wii U had sold 9.2 million units by the end of 2014. In its lifetime, the Nintendo Wii sold over 100 million units.
Screenshot via GameTrailers/YouTube
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