Go Play with Your Wii

What is in a name? When it comes to marketing a next generation console, I would imagine quite a lot. Nintendo’s choice of name for its new console is certainly a popular topic around the Internet at the moment, but is this really a marketing blunder?

Look at it this way, just because Nintendo chose a, in my opinion, ridiculous name, it is getting a lot of coverage for its new console. Not just on gaming sites, but there are blogs and news sites everywhere that are giving it hell for this. All of this is getting the Wii into the mind of the gaming population, which will make it easier to market when the shipping date comes around. While I doubt that Nintendo would name a console based purely on getting it covered on countless blogs, giving it an interesting name does create a talking point, thus half of the marketing department’s job is already done.

When it comes down to it, it is going to be the gaming experience that sells this console anyway. It was never Nintendo’s intention to build a console that could compete with other next-gen systems on a hardware bases – it is competing on a ‘fun’ level, giving the owner a new way to play. If it makes full use of this ‘wand’ type controller, and it turns out to be super-cool, who is really going to care what it is called?