Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter has reiterated that Nintendo NX must have key third-party support to succeed, evening the playing field to allow customers to base their purchase decision on first-party content alone.
He attributes Wii U’s faltered performance to the absence of series such as Madden, FIFA, Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto – although that was once prototyped – but reasoned that hardware differentiation and lack of sales had led to third-parties becoming reluctant to approach the console.
“The easy answer is third-party support,” Siftd‘s newest Pachter Factor episode, asked as to how Nintendo NX can be a commercial success. “Where I think Nintendo lost its way, and the reason that I have been so harshly critical of Nintendo leadership in the past is they were too focused on first-party software and not focused enough on keeping third-parties engaged.
“I don’t mean to suggest that the business people at Nintendo weren’t nice to third-parties, of course they were – they were accommodating and they did the best they could. I mean the hardware was sufficiently different that it was expensive to make third-party games, and third-parties found that their games did not perform well.
“EA had this All-Play and it was big-hit sports characters, and no body bought anything. I mean, poor Peter Moore, I remember him talking about how big that was going to be, and he’s still there… and it wasn’t. I remember their head of marketing, I think she’s gone… but, that was just a disaster.
“And Ubisoft made ZombiU, remember that classic for the Wii U? Third-party support is the only way that the NX is going to succeed, and not being the Wii U. So, the Wii U with the GamePad just sucked. It made your arms tired, it had a crappy battery life, it didn’t add a lot to the gameplay, and the best games don’t even use the GamePad. The NX, no GamePad goes a long way toward helping it to succeed.”
He closed, “But third-party support, so you should be as a gamer indifferent among any of the three consoles except for first-party content. Because you should be able to play Madden, FIFA, Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto on any console you wish, and then the deciding factor becomes whether you can play Nintendo content, Microsoft content, or Sony first-party content. Nintendo lost its way by not having GTA on this console, not having FIFA on the Wii U, and if the aren’t on NX then it is doomed before it launches. So, that’s the way to make it succeed.”
