Michael Pachter has been known to be down on Nintendo most of the time, and especially in recent years- even in our own interview with him earlier this year, Pachter was pretty pessimistic about Nintendo and their chances going forward. However, it appears as though he may have changed his mind- and what caused him to do so? Nintendo’s incredible E3 showing of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
“Zelda looks amazing,” Pachter told Gamertag Radio at E3 last week. “Something I missed… I actually did not realize that Zelda was launching on NX when NX launches. That makes me think NX is much more higher powered than I expected, that NX is an iteration probably closer to PS4 than I thought it would be, and it’s going to have a big title to support it.
“I think probably only Wii U owners will buy Zelda, but I think everybody who buys an NX will absolutely buy it, and I think it will sell them 10 million consoles pretty quickly. Zelda looked great. I mean, it really looks like a good game.”
Pachter believes that the Wii U was hurt by Zelda not launching on it for so long after it was out, until it was too late- but the flipside, he believes, is that the NX is set to benefit by having an incredible looking game right off the bat.
“It’s sad that it took them so many years after the Wii U launched to get it out,” Pachter continued, “but the silver lining in that cloud is that it’s going to launch on the NX, so the NX is going to be something you will want to own.”
All in all, it sounds like he believes Nintendo may be about to turn their fortunes around in the console gaming market- the Wii U has sold 13 million units worldwide so far, after almost four years on the market. Pachter’s admittedly enthusiastic projections paint the NX at 10 million units just because of Zelda, which might sound absurd, but is also not that unreasonable, considering The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and the Wii launch in 2006.
Will Zelda actually be the game to rejuvenate Nintendo? Who knows? At this point, we can just hope the game lives up to its showing, more than anything else. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is due out in 2017 on Nintendo NX and Wii U.
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