He’s surely the gaming industry’s most well-known crystal ball-gazer, the man whose views US blog Kotaku once reported on almost 20 times in two months, and, like most analysts, he gets his fair share of stick on gaming forums. His name (drumroll, maestro) is Michael Pachter, and - despite what snotty message board detractors might say - the majority of this Wedbush Morgan employee’s predictions regarding the games industry actually turn out to be right on the button.

Naturally however, there’s an element of risk involved in Pachter’s line of work, a chance that some predictions will go slightly askew, or even prove quite spectacularly wrong. Many of his more wayward prophecies have been swept surreptitiously beneath the carpet of recent history, so GamerSquad decided to go quote-hunting in a bid to find some of the Pachterisms that not only missed the goal, but flew clean out of the stadium for good measure.

Want to see what we mean? Then let's get started:




PREDICTION 1: Sony to walk this gen, Nintendo to finish a distant third

Armed with the wondrous benefits of hindsight (and no small amount of smugness), we begin our quest for off-target Pachterisms on May 21, 2005. At the time, the launch of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 was half a year away, the PS3 a full eighteen months into the future, and Nintendo’s new machine still carried the (still superb) codename of Revolution.

Not that this discouraged Pachter from having a stab at forecasting the winner of the forthcoming next-gen battle. Here's a nugget he produced in a 2005 report on the state of the industry:

"In 2010, Sony's going to have 55 per cent, Microsoft's going to have 35 per cent and Nintendo 10 per cent, with all three of those having plus or minus five per cent."

Now, we have to play fair here. After all, you may have noticed we're yet to reach 2010, so those figures could well be correct another three years from now. But, hand on heart, we don’t believe that to be the case, and neither does Pachter, apparently. Writing earlier this year in another of his reports, Pachter's expectations had clearly shifted somewhat:

"Ultimately, we see Sony ‘winning’ the console war with 36% of the market, with Nintendo 'capturing' second place at 34% and Microsoft finishing third at 30%."

Some sympathy where it’s due, though: after all, you’d have needed a De Lorean and a wild-eyed scientist as a best friend to accurately foresee just what the Nintendo Wii was going to bring to the gaming table.




PREDICTION 2: WoW won't wow gamers

The date: September 06, 2005. Over the previous ten months, World of Warcraft had been released in all major regions, and was taking the world of online gaming by storm. Yet, in an interview with the New York Times, our man Pachter wasn’t hugely optimistic about the future of Blizzard’s MMORPG, or for online games as a whole for that matter:

"I don't think there are four million people in the world who really want to play online games every month. World of Warcraft is such an exception. I frankly think it's the buzz factor, and eventually it will come back to the mean, maybe a million subscribers."


Nearly two years later, World of Warcraft has hit nine million subscribers, with the ten millionth surely a certainty before 2007's Christmas period.




PREDICTION 3: HD graphics will be essential

As the Xbox, PlayStation 2 and GameCube gradually gave way to their hardware successors, it was easy to be seduced by the snazzy high-definition graphics being served up by the Xbox 360 and PS3. Pachter, speaking to Gamasutra on October 11, 2006, revealed just how important he deemed the new visual standard to be:

"I think HD resolution is the essential difference between this cycle and the last. Although it is clear that there will be much more happening on-screen, with more independently acting characters, the visceral improvement in graphics is probably the first thing noticed by consumers."

Mikey, it would have been hard to disagree with you back in October of 2006, yet if we fast-forward ten months, it's the Wii that has just taken the lead in the worldwide next-gen console race. Without the aid of high-definition graphics we might add.




PREDICTION 4: Bully heading for low grades

For a time, Pachter was no fan of Rockstar's controversial schoolyard adventure Bully, predicting the game would prove a flop with both critics and consumers. Here's just a snippet from a damning Pachter-penned WMS report:

"My guess is that [Bully] did NOT sell particularly well at holiday... [My] estimates total 800,000 units at an average wholesale price of around $30, so it will likely generate around $24 million in revenues. Since the game took three years to develop, it likely cost Take-Two close to $15 million in R&D, and my guess is that the company did no better than to break even. I would NOT expect a sequel."

He was right about the lack of a sequel - thus far, Rockstar has announced only a forthcoming Wii and Xbox 360 version of the original PS2 Bully. Yet the game did receive glowing reviews, and sold in healthy numbers, prompting the following mea culpa from the outspoken games analyst:

"I have been consistently wrong about this title. I thought it would be stupid, and it was fun; I thought it would get poor reviews, and it got solid 90s; and I thought it would bomb, while it now appears to be a million unit seller. As a result, I did not expect a sequel, while now I have to acknowledge that a sequel is a possibility. I never hesitate to take credit when I'm right, and I never hide from my mistakes."

PREDICTION 5: "Father of PlayStation" being groomed for top job? Not quite...

November 2006 saw a management shuffle at Sony HQ, with Messrs. Hirai, Tretton, and Kutaragi - the so-called "Father of the PlayStation" - all enjoying promotions. What could such a move possibly signal?

When asked by GameDaily.biz, Pachter was pretty sure he knew what was in the pipeline…

"I think it's prudent succession planning. Kutaragi is the visionary, and his work on PS3 was done at launch. They need to groom him to replace [big boss of the entire Sony Corporation Howard] Stringer."

One would imagine Kutaragi was delighted to read about Pachter touting him for Stringer's job (which also happened to be the number-one post at his beloved Sony), but probably a little less delighted five months later, when he was essentially pushed into the role of Honorary Chairman by Sony, a non-executive position of little more than symbolic importance.


So there you have it, proof positive that videogame prediction does just what it says on the tin. Despite Pachter's fairly solid rate of accuracy within the field, it would be worth your while absorbing any analyst commentary with a healthy pinch of salt. That said, it was good to see the Wedbush Morgan diamond geezer openly state he's the first to hold his hands up when he's wrong. Good man.