At the time of its release, the manner on how it they’d marketed that was confusing as they showcased the Wii U gamepad as if its a portable console (its not) since its rather the main controller for the Wii U console. I was in high school when the console was first revealed, my reaction to that was “WTF?” as I thought the gamepad was portable, as the ads often flex that it can be (or the way they showed it came off as that).
The name is usually what people blame, but if that’s the case why did they succeed with NES being followed up by SNES? Or Game Boy followed by Game Boy Color and then Game Boy Advance?
Hard to fault them for following a pattern that had worked great for them in the past.
Basically way larger audience. The big thing in gaming around 2005-ish is that everyone is a potential gamer, including people who mostly don’t care about or are not used to specific console releases.
Also I’d argue a “Super” is a clearer mark of upgrade than a single, very random letter or number (that is specifically not used like a version number like “GameMachine 4” but instead a weird portmanteau).
Also counterpoint : Nintendo of America used a lot of marketing to try and make people stop calling consoles “a Nintendo”, and part of this was the lack of distinction between NES and SNES (the other part was confusion with the competition).
To 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.
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.
Super, Color, Advance all describe the console. The customer knows what they are getting.
U is a letter that gives no information. Is it a themed Wii for college kids? Is it a U shaped controller upgrade? Is it a screen addon? Is it an online social media thing?
If you had asked me before coming into this thread what the Wii U actually was, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. I knew it was a flop. I knew nobody who actually had one. I didn’t even remember it had a screen. I knew I wasn’t interested in getting one at the time even though I had a Wii and a 360 but didn’t have either the PS4 or XBOne. So I think both the weird name and the fact it wasn’t wanted or needed by anyone are to blame for its failure.
In addition to what others have said, a large part of the problem here was that the marketing heavily focused on the GamePad rather than showing the whole console. So it was an understandable mistake to think the Wii U was a controller. That’s not a problem any of those other systems had, they were more clearly advertised as consoles.