Comment on Why is the Wii U considered a flop?
dan1101@lemmy.world 1 week agoTo me Super Nintendo sounds like a super version of the Nintendo, and Super is the first word.
Game Boy Color implies it is a Gemeboy with a color screen.
Game Boy Advance sounds like an advanced version of the Game Boy.
Wii U tells you nothing. It starts with Wii and then adds the nonsensical letter U, that’s all the information the name conveys.
brsrklf@jlai.lu 1 week ago
The reasoning behind it was the Wii was called like that because it was a console for everyone, as in “we”. Cue the weird ads with the two middle-aged Japanese men coming to random families with a wii in a suitcase asking “We would like to play!”.
By Wii U time the market had changed a lot. They knew they wouldn’t be able to count on casual gaming alone anymore (mobile apps had absorbed most of it) so they needed to recapture more traditional gamers too. So they added U, as in, “this console is not just the party console, it’s for you, too!”
Yeah, it didn’t work. It was confusing, didn’t really roll off the tongue, and wasn’t different enough from the original wii’s name to get people to notice it. Wii was a one-time trick, it worked because nothing looked or was named like that. They might have had more luck giving the U a completely new coat of paint.
Then again maybe not. They pulled the trick again with the Switch, because new name, and because that name reflected the real clever shtick of it, being a hybrid console. Wii U’s gimmick was rather weak and hard to use well.