Pachter’s Wii U Pro Controller threats from Activision were an ‘educated guess’

Earlier this week, industry analyst Michael Pachter expressed his beliefs that the Wii U console "isn't going to work" and that Nintendo "won't get lucky" with their new console as they did with the original Wii.

While it's a debatable subject that remains to be seen, the bigger controversy here is comments he made regarding Activision and supposed threats they made if Nintendo didn't offer a more "conventional controller".

Pachter originally said Activision would only create games for the Wii U console, and bring its most popular Call of Duty franchise to the system, if it offered a conventional controller – one like the Wii U Pro Controller which was revealed at E3.

At the time Pachter admitted that Activision never told him this, but made it sound like "'they said, 'no we're not putting it on there if you don't give us a conventional controller.' So they gave in.'"

It's easy to see how it could be misconstrued or misinterpreted. Attempting to clarify his words, Pachter told VentureBeat his comments were nothing more than an "educated guess" that he arrived at by "putting two and two together."

“I am putting two and two together to conclude that Activision put pressure on them,” he said. “I do not know this either first-hand or third-hand; nobody told me. I am merely deducing it from what we know, and it’s an educated guess."

“If the Pro Controller is for multiplatform games, that means it is for third-party games. Nintendo has never done anything altruistically for third parties, so I concluded that they added the Pro Controller because of pressure from third parties," he explained. "The pressure could have come from anywhere — EA with sports games, Ubisoft with Assassin’s Creed, or Take-Two with GTA — but it seems to me that the ‘prize’ that would make the Wii U legitimate as a console of choice for multiplatform games is Call of Duty.”

Pachter went on to cite what he heard from Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 developer Treyarch studio head, Mark Lamia, who said the Pro Controller "seemed tailored for the game he is working on for release this fall."

"You can see how I concluded that Activision put pressure on them,” he concluded.

So far, the only confirmed platforms for Black Ops 2 are PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. There is a mobile version for the PlayStation Vita titled Call of Duty: Black Ops: Declassified, but information is scarce. Details about the game were leaked last month, but the developer remains a mystery.