Pachter slams Nintendo’s Iwata, doesn’t know why he’s still employed

Industry analyst Michael Pachter isn’t the biggest fan of Nintendo’s strategy as a company and has let anyone who’ll listen know that plainly. Now he’s outright slammed the Nintendo president Satoru Iwata.

Pachter, who works for Wedbush Morgan, made the comments at the Game Monetization USA Summit in San Francisco recently saying that “I don’t know why Iwata is still employed”. He then went on to call the Nintendo Wii U’s performance on the retail shelves “underwhelming” and added that a recovery for the longtime gaming company this generation was still possible- but unlikely in his estimation.

There’s no doubt that the Wii U has struggled here in the first year of the console’s availability, but even so Pachter’s commentary seems a bit overly harsh. Sales of the console have been rising as of late and the gaming catalog got a shot in the arm from some really solid to great Holiday titles like Wind Waker HD,  Super Mario 3D World and a host of 3rd party games. ‘Down, but not out’ I think sums up Nintendo’s position nicely at present and it’s not exactly the apocalyptic scenario that Pachter has presented. And while there might be more than a few who think that Iwata isn’t doing a stellar job as Nintendo chief, I think it might be a little early in the game to seriously be calling for his head, in a figurative sense of course. Now, if things are the same or worse in a year or so, then I think you’d be on target.

If you’d like to read a little more about what the analyst had to say (including a few more gems about Nintendo) hit this link to go to industry site MCV’s original story about the ‘incident’. But what do you think about it?

Should Iwata be ‘sacked’ as the Big N’s head man, or should he be given a little more time before a successor should seriously be thought about?