Master analyst, Michael Pachter, predicts that Switch will not sell near Wii.

[Alkibiádēs]

RolStoppable said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:

As he hasn't been fired yet, it's very likely that he gives the right professional advices to investors that pay his company fees for his services.
Updating his predictions is part of his job, anyway.
Maybe, besides giving paying investors the right advices, he deliberately adorns them with outlandish analyses, so that not paying public can't use them and his clients themselves neither, if they stop paying him to have the conclusions.

Maybe. It's certainly possible that his paid analyses are reasonable while in public he acts like a clown.

But I prefer the theory that he keeps his job because numerous big third party publishers pay him to write Nintendo off and then they show these "professional" analyses to their own investors in order to justify not developing any games for Nintendo. It's quite common that the advice Pachter proposes to console manufacturers mirrors what third parties want.

Pachter is a consultant, not an analyst. I'll quote someone from Reddit (he explains it better than I ever could):

"He's not an analyst, he's a consultant. His primary job is to convince businesses to give him money. Usually so he can tell executives stuff that everyone else knows and is trying to tell them, but they refuse to listen.

Pachter mostly bullshits to convince executives he knows what he is talking about. He doesn't give a shit if he is right. The executives don't pay close enough attention to keep track of his record. They just think "that's the consultant everyone asks for predictions, he must be good."

Analysts use actually science, statistics, and data to provide insight.

Consultants for the most parts are a big scam/liability. They are more motivated to make sure they keep getting work and less motivated to fix problems.

If a consultant fixes all your problems he's out of a job and it is hard to get references too. A business doesn't want to tell a competitor "this consulting company is amazing, they fixed everything to the point where we don't need him anymore."

So instead what you'll often see is consultants try to worm their way into the structure, impede communications, and make the business processes unnecessarily dependent on them. It might be far better for Group A and Group B to communicate directly, but a consultant or contractor will insist they facilitate all communications. They provide some initial knowledge to gain trust and over time become parasites."