Pachter: "I don’t know why Iwata is still employed"

Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter has stepped up his media onslaught on Nintendo by saying that president Satoru Iwata should be sacked.

"I don’t know why Iwata is still employed," Pachter told the Game Monetization USA Summit in San Francisco, GamesIndustry reports, adding that the Wii U’s commercial performance has been "underwhelming” and that he believed it was possible but unlikely” that new titles could help the system to recover.

He also reiterated that Nintendo is missing a huge opportunity” by not releasing its back-catalogue portable titles on smartphones and tablets.

Pachter has been Nintendo’s most vocal critic for over a year now. Here’s a selection of his previous comments:

They steadfastly refuse to consider that [Wii U] is not interesting to consumers. They will fail to hit 9m, and they will likely miss their profit goals.” – link

Nintendo’s in a world of trouble right now. I think they are at the bottom of a huge mountain with a huge uphill climb. I don’t think they’re going to get that mojo back. The way it shakes out is anyone who actually buys a Wii U really is a hardcore gamer and is going to buy a PS4 and Xbox One in addition so they can play those third party titles that they love. So I think Nintendo becomes a distant third in this console race.” – link

EA recently announced that it had no Wii U games in development, and it remains a possibility that the publisher will abandon the platform entirely. Should other third parties follow EA’s lead, the Wii U could be relegated to a first party only platform.” – link

"I don’t get [Wii U]. I think that essentially this is a solution in search of a problem. I mean, somebody had an idea – ‘let’s make the controller a tablet’ – and there aren’t many games that are going to take advantage of that. [The Wii was] gimmicky. It worked, they got lucky. I don’t think they’re getting lucky with Wii U. I don’t think [Nintendo] suck – I just think that they really believe that, ‘If we’re still novel, everything we do will work’. This isn’t going to work. Hardcore gamers will buy them; hardcore Nintendo fanboys will buy it. They could put out a piece of cardboard and say that it’ll play Mario and they’ll buy it." – link