Riiiiiiight, the "industry" as a whole "hates" Nintendo. That's why so many journalists practically trip over themselves to lavish Nintendo 1st party titles with high review scores, regardless of whether those titles deserve them *cough*bothWiiZeldas*cough* (and many more). If folks in the industry don't like talking about Nintendo at times, it's because Nintendo is not interested in releasing the kind of titles that folks really into gaming are interested in. Just look at what the tremendous amount of fan and industry pressure it took for NoA to release the Operation Rainfall games when they had nothing else worth mentioning set for release in the Wii's final years. It's hard to be excited about a company that couldn't care less what you're interested in as an industry insider.
I said in my post which you quoted "I don't know about the industry as a whole", meaning I agree its not the entire industry. What I said was he had a point because I've seen a lot of anti-Nintendo bias. Of course its not that way with every editor in every magazine, but it seems to be the case with the majority. They do give many Nintendo AAA games like Zelda high scores, but they pretty much have to because those games are great and do deserve a high score, and if they didn't there would be a backlash from fans. They can't get away with attacking Nintendo's AAA titles, but they do snipe at Nintendo in other ways whenever they can.
I've seen in Game Informer where they routinely bash Wii games as having "poor graphics" and give the game overall a low score even though in other respects it might be awesome. They don't do that with the untouchable AAA games like Mario or Zelda, but they regularly do this with all the others. When judging a game's graphics shouldn't the reviewers take into account the limitations of the system that game is on? It is no secret that the Wii can't do HD graphics and everyone knows this, so why do they constantly bring down the rating of Wii games on the basis of lacking HD graphics which is impossible for the game to have?
And in a recent magazine a few months ago they congratulated the Xbox 360 for selling 60 million consoles and then they congratulated the PS3 for being not far behind, and then in the fine print they said the Wii was in 1st place with over 100 million but also slammed it as being "irrelevant". How is that not an anti-Nintendo bias? And I've seen articles discussing the upcoming war between the next xbox and the PS4 with no mention of the WiiU whatsoever as if it doesn't even exist. I don't want to get into discussing politics, but the way Nintendo is treated by the gaming media reminds me a lot of how the MSM treats Ron Paul (like he doesn't exist).
I'm not a huge fan of Pacter, but he's said on more than one occasion (there's a particular Pac Attack episode where he addresses this) that an analyst is considered successful if they can accurately predict trends around a surprisingly low percentage. IIRC the number's around 30-50%. He's not right all the time, and I don't think he pretends that he is.
I'll never forget some analyst's prediction back in 2006 that the Wii was going to sell 18 million units total and be in a distant third this generation, and this prediction came after E3 of that year when there was so much hype and excitement. It annoys and angers me that people are getting paid, and probably paid well, to make these idiotic predictions. There's no one who could ever be 100% accurate and I accept that, but you could take any random person from this or any other site and their predictions would probably be no less accurate than that of these so called "professionals" who are getting paid for this. And there does seem to be an anti-Nintendo bias in these predictions. It used to be "Nintendo was going to fail", but when Nintendo succeeded they changed it to "Nintendo will fail in the future". They absolutely refuse to ever acknowledge or accept the reality that Nintendo is here to stay.
I am curious, though, just what "all these signs" are that point to the Wii U being successful. Nothing about what I've seen of the console convinces me that there is yet anything special about it, anything that makes it worth my purchase when the games it's touted as having I can already play on my existing consoles. And they've announced nothing that convinces me they'll keep their existing casual audience with this console. IMO, Nintendo has yet to announce anything that makes the Wii U especially noteworthy (no, not even the tablet controller, a gimmick created around a feature I have no use for). Hopefully E3 will be better in that regard, but right now I'm not seeing a Home Run from Nintendo on the Wii U yet.
What I mean by "all signs" is that it looks like Nintendo has got their act more or less together and have addressed a lot of the complaints developers had with the Wii. The hardware seems to be adequately powerful enough to hold its own, and the online infrastructure seems to be coming together. Maybe in the end Nintendo will **** it up somehow, but so far based on the rumors it sounds like the developers are reasonably impressed, and that is a good sign. If Pachter and all those other assclowns did their jobs they would be looking into what people in the know are saying and factor that into their predictions, but they don't.
What it seems like to me is these analysts are basing their predictions on obsolete information. That idiot in 2006 who predicted the Wii would sell only 18 million consoles was probably basing his prediction on the Gamecube, and assumed that since the Gamecube was in 3rd place then the Wii would also end up that way. And now Packtard seems to be thinking the WiiU will have terrible third party support just becasue the Wii did. These analysts never seem to take into account that things do change and Nintendo seems to have at least tried to fix those issues which caused the Wii to have terrible 3rd party support.
The job of these analysts is supposed to be predicting the future, but really what they seem to be doing is just telling you what the present is and then extending that 5 years into the future as if not one single thing has changed. That's like a weatherman predicting its going to be raining 5 days from now just because it happens to be raining today. There is a 30-50% chance he could be right, but instead of listening to him we could use things like satellites and doppler radar and so on and get a prediction which is 90% accurate. That's the kind of analyzing that Packtard should be doing. He says a 30-50% accuracy rating is a job well done, but an analyst with a brain could maybe boost that accuracy to 70-80%.