Thu, Oct 11, 2012 | 06:55 BST

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Pachter: Third parties unlikely to succeed on Wii U

The Wii U won’t be friendly to third-party publishers, industry analyst Michael Pachter has warned.

Speaking to [a]list, the Wedbush Morgan analyst said he doesn’t really see the point of the Game Pad’s second screen, which he called a “disaggregated” DS which is “not natural” to watch while using a TV. Developers and publishers won’t know what to make of it, he added.

“I’m afraid we’re going to have a repeat of the Wii cycle from the publishers’ perspective and the developers’ perspective, where very few people will support it,” he said.

“Then if it’s successful they’ll come in, and they’ll fail. When they fail, they’ll go away again. The reason I think they’ll fail is, I can’t think of a third-party publisher that did well on the DS. I mean, Scribblenauts, so there are a handful games and you can count them. Nobody did very well on the DS, and I don’t think anybody’s going to do very well on the Wii U.”

Pachter predicted that the Wii U will sell strongly to hardcore Nintendo fans, but won’t gain traction beyond that because it’s more expensive than the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

The Wii U launches in the west in November; get all the launch details from our information hub.

Thanks, GamesIndustry.

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