Industry analyst Michael Pachter has joined the growing ranks of those who remain unimpressed with Nintendo’s latest console effort.
“We think that Wii U is arriving two years late, given that the other HD consoles already have peripherals for movement,” Pachter opined in a note to investors.
”As Nintendo did not provide any specifics around the new console’s power or pricing, we are assuming the Wii U is unlikely to provide greater power than the current HD consoles.”
Pachter also noted that, contingent upon pricing, the system will either be a “phenomenal success or a phenomenal failure.”
“Competitive bundles for Xbox 360 with Kinect and PS3 with Move are likely to be priced below $300 by the time the Wii U launches,” he explained.
As TG Daily previously reported, a number of investors have also expressed their concerns about the new system, questioning if Nintendo is truly prepared to contend with the paradigm shift posed by the rapid increase in mobile gaming.
“It’s [really] unclear who Nintendo is targeting with the Wii U and where it wants to go,” Tokai Tokyo Research Center analyst Yusuke Tsunoda told the Wall Street Journal last week.
According to Tsunoda, the Wii U “doesn’t ease” growing concerns about prospects for specialized game consoles, when quite a number of consumers are perfectly content with playing (casual) games on their smartphones.
Although Nintendo president Satoru Iwata insisted the corporation didn’t “make any kind of blunder” at E3, he did acknowledge certain “misunderstandings” due to “so much emphasis” on the tablet-like controller.
“I should have shown a single picture of the new console, then started talking about the controller… [Still], the console is not drastically different, and Wii U is about the controller. The console itself will be almost invisible.”
