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Nintendo's 'Wii' Just A Marketing Gimmick?
An anonymous reader writes "Tom's Hardware has an editorial up on the Nintendo Wii in which the author postulates that the new name may be a bigger PR stunt than it looks. From the article: 'Saying Wii is controversial mainly in the English-speaking world (the Japanese can't even pronounce it); in France, for instance, it's a homonym for oui. But the upcoming E3 Expo plays mostly to an English-speaking crowd, even though it's an international event. It's just over a week to E3, where Sony fans will be all giddy and running around like they have a Blu-ray chasing their tails. Amid all this, Nintendo announces a name change which is not only interesting, but controversial. You can't not notice it. Essentially, Nintendo steals more than a wee bit of Sony's thunder.'"
Did Nintendo do this just to get more support when they bring back "Coke Classic" (i.e. Revolution or another better name)?
Even if this IS the name, they certainly got quite a lot of press over it.
I still don't really like it. I'll buy the system, don't get me wrong. They could call it "Magic Happy Leprosy Spreading Bad Smell Maker" and I'd buy it. But I think Revolution was such a perfect name. It was catchy, yet differentiated the console perfectly.
DS was just a code name and they said they would change the name, until they said DS was the final name.
Is this all a stunt? Who knows. We'll find out when the system actually launches.
That said, I'm getting used to the name. Maybe it's like Game Cube and I'll come to like it.
That said the blurb mentions that "wii" is not a sound in the Japanese language (which I've heard elsewhere). I've heard that "revolution" is similarly unpronounceable because it also contains sounds not in Japanese. Is that true?
They could always call it Revolution here and the Japanese word for Revolution there (like the NES/Famicom, SNES/Super Famicom, Genesis/MegaDrive and a few others had different names).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
if this is indeed a hoax. When the name first came out, I was rather indifferent about it. In the end, I don't really care about the name, I'm still buying it :)
... OR ... Nintendo is a brilliant. Why brilliant? Well, what if on E3, they don't unveil the Wii .. they unveil the "XXXXXX" (Whatever the REAL name is) !!!??? Yah .. that would be absolutely pure genius. Not only did they steal attention of everyone for the 2 weeks BEFORE E3 ... they'll steal the attention at E3 and for the 2 weeks following!
However, I did have time to think about it, since I didn't waste my day posting to message boards about how I think it's so stupid like the rest of the world did. What I came up with was rather simular.
Either I'll be made fun of for playing my Wii
It wouldn't have been an expensive campaign either. 1 Press Release. 1 stupid little flash movie up on http://revolution.nintendo.com./ That's it!? And it got all this press!
Here's a little more fuel for this consipiracy fire. Why does http://wii.nintendo.com/ not work? That'd take a whole 10 seconds for someone to create that subdomain and point it to revolution.nintendo.com or even just mirror that page from it. Hmmmmmm? Maybe it isn't the name after all?!??!
Indeed, things that make you go Hmmmmmm.
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
I distinctly remember when "Dreamcast" was released that everyone thought it was a terrible, touchy-feely name. And when the iPod came out, we all thought Apple was smoking the eCrack. Even the PlayStation was a pretty dumb sounding name, and was proof that Sony's SNES CD was never going to amount to anything. For that matter, the Super NES sounded incredibly bad to US ears.
Now all of these names are recognized worldwide. They gained traction on the strength of the systems, and are now highly recognizable and much loved. It's theoretically possible that the same will happen to Wii.
Kotaku has a better breakdown of the situation, which includes the nugget that nobody prior to the announcement had registered any tradmarks or websites with the Wii name.
The ______ Agenda
Honestly, I'm not too sure that Nintendo named the Revolution Wii simply to gain press; I do think that Nintendo recognized that the Hard-Core segment of the gaming population would dislike the name and that simply releasing the name would provide a lot of press.
The question I want to ask is why does the Hard-Core gaming population hate the name Wii?
Personally, I think I know the answer. When you watch Nintendo's flash video you'll realize that Wii is not just cute, it's simply adorable; adorable in a way that only women and gay men really understand. The fact is that this is simply unacceptable to much of the gaming population because they wanted something edgier and cooler like "Nintendo Revolution Extreme 1080".
Face it, Nintendo may make games for them (and the system may be great for them) but Nintendo is no longer actively marketing towards Hard-Core gamers; with Animal Crossing, Brain Training and Nintendogs Nintendo has realized that they can be very successful with non-traditional gamers on a level no one ever has been (non-traditional as in women).
Will they be successful? I don't know, but the Nintendo DS has (so far) sold faster than the PS2 did simply because their potential market was much larger.
http://www.nintendowii.com/ was forwarding you to nintendo.com a couple days ago, and now it seems to do nothing, with no information in the whois lookup.
Put in a different perspective, voiceless "l" occurs phonetically in English, but English-speakers would probably find the name "Hlii" a bit awkward.
English is easier said than done.
This is all pure speculation, but it is entirely possible that this whole thing is a big, albeit late, April Fool's joke. Consider the following scenario: Thousands of people are gathered around Nintendo's booth at E3 waiting for them to talk more about the Wii, DS, and other things. A spokesperson for Nintendo steps up to a podium and begins delivering a speech about the Wii. "Wii have a dream!" the spokesperson begins. The speech is filled with similar puns and word plays. As the speech ends, the spokesperson closes with, "Of course, wii're just joking. Viva la REVOLUTION!" Screens light up with pictures of the Revolution/Wii and some of the games that are going to be launched or are being worked on for the console. Throw in some banners, fireworks, or anything else to add to the overall emotional rush and the entire expo will be talking about it. No one's going to care about the PS3's launch or how many tera-majigaflops it can do and how it's better than the Xbox 360 and can play Blu-Ray movies. No one's going to care about Halo 3 demo (non-playable) that Microsoft came up with. Nintendo will essentially steal the show if they were to do something like this. The important part is that there's a lot of fanfare so that everyone gets caught up in the moment. They'll also need to keep the surprises and big announcements comming in a steady rate after that to keep the emotions running high. I'd suggest allowing people to get hands on and showing some good looking vaporware to keep people excited. Kudos if it isn't vaporware, but it really doesn't matter if it will keep people impressed. They'll get coverage based on the games they're releasing, but they'll get even more when every site that posted a story about the Wii has to post another one saying it was all a big gag that Nintendo played on everyone. Of course, like I said, this is all purely speculation.
Put in a different perspective, voiceless "l" occurs phonetically in English, but English-speakers would probably find the name "Hlii" a bit awkward.
/wi/ in Japanese) initial /hl/ is a cluster that was perfectly ordinary in Old English, but has fallen out of use.
/hl/, the change was to /l/: Old English hlaford becomes Modern English lord.
That's a better example than you may realise, given that (like
In the case of English
OK, the Hiragana is rarely used, but it's not totally gone e.g. Wiku is still a girl's name. In any case, Japanese pronunciations are not limited to Hiragana, the language range has expanded to encompass foreign words, which are often written in Katakana, but product names such as Wii will stay in Roman. (Do you really think the Japanese marketing people would choose a name they could not pronounce?)
PS: "hl" is fun - I spent years in South Africa, where I learned to pronounce Zulu words such as "Hluhluwe". It helpth to have a lithp! 8)
(this is not a
I'm not a "hardcore" gamer (though I play a decent number of games). I think the name is dumb. My older brother IS a hardcore gamer, he works for Sega, and he thinks the name is dumb. My fiance is not a gamer. She likes Paper Mario and Bejewelled and that's about it. She thinks the name is dumb.
Everyone I've spoken to (IRL) about this thinks the name is dumb, be they male or female, gay or straight. I don't need an edgy name, I think GameCube was a pretty good name - simple but descriptive. But Wii looks stupid on paper, and sounds even worse when actually pronounced.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
I don't think it's a joke, or if it is it's gonna backfire. Nintendo's biggest software partners didn't find out about the name any earlier than the rest of us (I know this for a fact). They are all in the middle of finalizing their E3 stands and promotional materials and now all of a sudden they have to change all the names to Wii. If Nintendo stand up on day one and change the name again, they will be VERY pissed off.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Subdomains don't need to propagate. You can create a subdomain and have it working in a matter of seconds. I do it all the time with my domain.
If you *change* the IP address of a subdomain, then you have to wait for the caches to be purged, but creating one is a different matter. A (non-cached) subdomain is queried directly from your domain's nameserver, so there is no propagation delay at all.
Re. search engine scoring: excellent point; their marketing people must have taken that into consideration. It would virtually guarantee that any name they chose would have to have been completely unheard of in all major languages (except possibly as a little-known acronym).
Consider the other criteria met by the name "Wii":
It's short (one or two syllables, depending on how syllables are delimited in a language).
It's easy to pronounce in all major languages (despite erroneous claims to the contrary).
It looks and/or sounds foreign in a lot of major languages (if not all of them). Thus it grabs attention when people first see it.
It's a homonym (or near-homonym) for other words in a lot of major languages. (Thus it's really easy to come up with a play on words, which leads people to use the word more, whether intentionally or by accident. There will be a lot of people saying, "no pun intended" for a while.)
All of that leads people to start talking about their product *FOR FREE*. It also serves to distinguish their image from that of their competitors.
And, as you point out, the name doesn't factor into the "buy/don't buy" decision-making process. The novelty, quality of games, and price will do that. The name is there mainly to help draw attention and curiosity, and it's doing a bang-up job of that so far.
Thus, despite comments like those from Penny Arcade's Tycho, I suspect someone at Nintendo is going to get a promotion (or a pay raise, or -- at the very least -- a cookie) because of this.
But Nintendo is now ambiguous. In the NES days there was only one Nintendo. Now you could mean a Wii, a Gamecube, a GBA, a DS, etc.
Did you miss the announcements that wii will play gamecube games from the disks, and that you will be able to download and play N64, NES, SNES, and other nintendo games through emulation. The wii is not just a next generation console, it is a Nintendo. I think that people going back to using 'play nintendo' fits perfectly since on the wii they could mean they were going to play red steel or super mario bros 3.
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My uncle, who is Japanese and has lived in Japan all his life, literally can't hear the difference between "clown" and "crown" when he hears them. Both my parents (also Japanese, but who have spent a lot of time in the States) have less trouble, but still get them confused all the time.
Interestingly, they mix up R's and L's in their written emails, too! Guess there's some truth to those stereotypes after all.
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
"Wiku is still a girl's name"
What!? I'd be really interested to see a link to any evidence of this. Most Japanese who don't read much old literature don't even know how to write the hiragana for "wi," I don't someone would be crazy enough to name their kid something that starts with a sound no longer used. (Note, I am not Japanese, but I live in Japan, have for several years, and speak the language)
Of course, perhaps there is a name that uses a kanji that was once pronounced that way, but unless you've been to Edo-era Japan recently, I call bullshit on girls named Wiku. Maybe you got confused with Miku?
Wii is written "uii," not "wii," in Japanese kana (just check the Nintendo Japan website if you don't believe me), though they will probably usually write the English letters in ads etc..
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Actually, the single phoneme "wi" has been recognized again in modern Japanese, although it's now used for loanwords as opposed to the original "wi" sound seen in classical Japanese. This is handled in exactly the same way as the "ti" phoneme.
It's now written with a large katakana U and a small katakana i. A good example is "Golden Week" (go-ruden wi-ku, where "wi" represents the big U + little i combo). Which is this week by the way. Ironically, I'd say that it's likely that this is the very phrase that really cemented the "wi" phoneme in modern spoken Japanese.
This is actually fairly recent, to the point that some dictionaries don't recognize it, and still write words like "Golden Week" with the i as a full-sized katakana. But it certainly isn't true that the phoneme does not exist. In fact, all of my junior high school textbooks have the words for foreign cities (like Winnipeg) written with the single phoneme version, and that's the pronunciation that's taught in school.
It's true that the very older generations will still pronounce "wi" as the dipthong "ui" (my grandmother calls a "T shirt" a "tay shirt" / tei syatu) but there will be little problem with the recognition of the sound.
And to dispel random speculation: JAPANESE PEOPLE HAVE NO PROBLEM SAYING "Wii"!
If you want to pick on a product, how about the Hitachi Wooo. Despite the written W, there is no phoneme in Japanese for that sound (or sounds like Woman, Worchestershire, etc.) So it's actually pronounced "uu" in Japanese (sounds like "Ooh" in English.) Now that is a product name that the Japanese can't "really" pronounce.
A web portal / search engine named YAHOO!
An online store that sells books named AMAZON.
An mp3 player called iPod.
A computer company called ASUS (*sarcastic* could sound like ASS US lol)
A lame handheld called the Nintendo DS.
A car named Integra...*sarcastic* LOL they can't spell integral
A game named Donkey Kong with no Donkey
etc etc etc.
The point is, in the end, the product will determine how the name will be remembered.