Michael Pachter believes the Nintendo NX can be successful

Mr.Pachter has a very unique opinion on Nintendo often bashing or praising Nintendo. Either way his opinions do make some great points. This time he speaks on the NX and it's potential to be a success:

“I think Nintendo could pull it off, and I think that the innovation here is we know that the DS was supremely profitable and sold gajillions of units. We know that the 3DS is less profitable and selling fewer units, but still millions per year. I think the forecast is now five million for this year, and that’s down from 25 – 30 million that DS did at its peak and down from the 13 million that the 3DS did.

But this thing isn’t only a handheld theoretically, assuming that these rumours are true. This is a handheld that can be docked and you can play the games on your television. That makes it more of a hybrid, a better way to look at it is an inexpensive console as opposed to a glorified handheld. I think that is somewhat appealing. I think if you can play Nintendo first-party IP, and if Nintendo get their releases out on time enough to support this thing, yes, I think it could be successful. Now how do we measure successful?

Nintendo is a public company, so I think that the right way to look at it is ‘are they making a profit for their shareholders?’ One thing I do like about the company is they don’t sell anything at a loss, so they will price NX such that they can make a profit on each hardware unit.

If they can sell five million or more units per year, they are going to be profitable on the software as well. They’ll sell plenty of Nintendo first-party, they will probably attract enough third-parties that the NX can be a modest success. The real question is, will the device be powerful enough to support third-party games?

And by third-party games, I mean can Electronic Arts take FIFA and port over the Xbox One version to NX. If the answer is no and they have to build a ground-up game, they’re probably not going to do it. And that’s what we saw with Wii U. If they can, then I think the NX can be very successful because there are a lot of Nintendo fans out there that want to play FIFA, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, but those aren’t available on Wii U. That really made people buy the Wii U only to play Nintendo first-party.

If the NX has first-party and third-party, I think it can be successful. If there’s first-party only, I do not think it has a chance at succeeding. So, we’ll see.”