Nintendo UK Defends the Wii

GamesIndustry.biz is running a story defending the Wii from across the pond. Nintendo's UK boss David Yarnton has nothing but good words for the new name for the Revolution. From the article: "It's like any new name ... it takes a while to get established. I think that you'll find that in not even six months, in a short period of time, people will accept it; they won't be referring to Revolution or next-generation, it'll just be Wii."

Comments

All I want

[ShadowsHawk]

is to be able to try it out with my own two hands. I really don't care what it's called as long as it works and has great games.

People will get used to it..

[new_breed]

..OVer here in Holland, they started a new channel called 'Yorin'. First, everybody was laughing and calling it 'urine', but that joke soon got old, and now it's just another channel on TV. And I'm sure all these foaming-mouth discussions concerning Wii will die away in time as well.

Re:People will get used to it..

[gEvil (beta)]

Unfortunately, that's just the way it seems that marketing works. After a short while, a name is just a name, and doesn't elicit any reaction. However, if you can create an initial buzz around something by giving it a noticable name, then you've done a good job. It doesn't matter how stupid the name is. Eventually everyone just gets used to it...

yesman

[lambent]

Of course the head of Nintendo UK would say that. What else is he capable of even saying?

"Well, frankly, I do in fact think the name sucks. They got their heads up their asses in marketing."

No way.

Re:yesman

[Meagermanx]

That's what I was thinking, too. A real news headline would be something like "Nintendo UK Speaks Out Against the Name 'Wii'"

Wii playable at E3?

[Mr. Sketch]

From TFA:
Yarnton encouraged commentators to "look beyond just the name, at the whole philosophy of what we're about," and said that he expected people to have a very different perception of the Wii once they've played the device at E3. [Emphasis mine]

This makes it sound like there will be a Wii playable on the floor at E3. Other reports I've heard made it sound like it would only be playable by a few select people.

Re:Wii playable at E3?

[interiot]

The gaming press is under an NDA that will be lifted at E3. A lot of the gaming press has already played the Wii, they just can't talk about it until E3 (or talk about it that much... a couple of the game press podcasts have been slipping some bits of info out).

Hasn't hurt their stock much

[antifoidulus]

NTDOY.PK has been increasing in value for the past week, it's up around $19.15 now, though that is probably due in part to the huge gains the yen has been making in the past 2 weeks.

Speaking of words....

[Mard]

...this guy sure used a lot of them, and managed to say nothing at all. I can't decide if the article was fluff because of the subject hoping to speak big from a small position, or if the people writing the article wishing they had some scoop, but working with their nothing instead.

We've already begun calling it a "Wii" amongst my very excited friends, none of which could be considered Nintendo fanboys. The name doesn't matter, the Wii will be big, and this next round of Sony vs Nintendo may be the most exciting yet for us consumers. We'll get the best of both worlds: great and innovative gameplay from Nintendo, and stunning graphics with revolutionary technology from Sony. This is the first time that I'll be purchasing both next-gen systems upon release, regardless of what they're called.

Re:Brits like it?

[squiggleslash]

The fact that brits like the name is just one more strike against it. Don't they eat something called spotted dick? And yea, I learn all my international culture from John Goodman flicks.

Well, yeah, Brits do. On the other hand, Americans buy furnature from a chain called "Badcock", and "Gaylord" is considered a reasonable name for a maker of packaging materials.

Normally this would be some nationality bashing thing, but actually I think it proves the point: Wii is fine. Given only one of its meanings is the one people are taking the...erm, wii, out of, and that in practice, you're more likely to hear the phoneme used to describe "A group of us" than "Urine", I'm still baffled about the hysterical reaction to it.

Still, if it does end up being a marketing disaster, it'll not be the first.

Just to get this bad pun out of the way...

[TooMuchEspressoGuy]

Nintendo UK: "Wii think the name will catch on."

Still call it Nintendo

[strider2k]

Amongst my friends and I, we call it "Wii". Amongst my FOB parents and FOB relatives, all video game products are called "Nintendo" with the exception of "Atari". Btw, the last game my parents played was Pac-Man on the Atari 2600. It requires no English skills, easy to learn, and fun for the whole family. With the remote style controller, I wouldn't need to explain how to play a game with my broken foreign language skills to my parents and/or relatives. FOB = Fresh Off the Boat (slang for immigrants coming from Asia to America)

Effects of names always wear off

[Peter Cooper]

They're right. I remember hordes of people saying "Vista" was a stupid name for the next Microsoft OS, and I thought it was pretty stupid too, but now it doesn't seem out of the ordinary. What about "Virgin"? Pretty funny the first few times you hear it, but it soon takes on a life of its own.

Re:Worked for my children, anyway

[kryten_nl]

Naming your kid "Mr. Ed" might have been pushing it a bit.

Nintendo UK to world:

[Anonymous Coward]

*thump thump thump*
*thump thump thump*
Wii will
Wii will
Rock you.

Re:Nintendo UK to world:

[amliebsch]

Please, no. No more Queen. That friggin' song is already one of the most over-used, cliched rock anthems ever produced. Every time I hear it in a commercial, I feel embarassed to hear it.

Re:Why didn't they call it the Nii ?

[Joe the Lesser]

*cover ears*

Aaahh! No more!

A better headline:

[Malor]

"Like it or not, Nintendo intends to shove Wii down your throat."

Re:Brits like it?

[Fallingcow]

you're more likely to hear the phoneme used to describe "A group of us" than "Urine", I'm still baffled about the hysterical reaction to it.

It's how it fits in a sentence. You can't use a posessive adjective with "we". Nor can you use articles. You can't say "a we" or "the we" or "some we".

Its similarity in sound to the first person plural pronoun actually makes the name even worse. It's why English speakers seem so apt to take it as "wee", since its place in relation to other words makes it sound like that.

Look:

"My wii" doesn't sound like "my we", but rather like "my wee", because if you take "wee" in the sense of urine then at least it's a noun that can take a posessive adjective, and if you take it as an adjective meaning "small" then it just sounds like you dropped a word off the end of the sentence, which, while odd, is still less odd than "My we", which is just awful.

This is also a problem when it's the subject of a sentence.

"Wii is the name of Nintendo's new game console"

"We is"? Huh? Wrong verb conjugation. Sounds broken. "Wee is"? Oh, urine is? Or are you saying that Nintendo has chosen a small name for their new console, without telling us what that name is?

THIS NAME BLOWS.

Nintendo must be hiring the same marketting dumbasses as Coke is. "Oh, 'Blak' is pronounced 'Black', of course, except that in preview pics of the bottles we had a pronounciation mark over that 'a' indicating that it should be pronounced long, so it would sound like "Blake", mostly because we though it looked cool. Oh, and because we're total dipshits who somehow managed to get a degree in a field in which communication is vital without ever setting foot in an English class."

HAVE YOU NOT BEEN ONLINE???

[246o1]

That joke was not even funny the first time I read it on /. or wherever, and it certainly isn't now, about 187,282 times later. PLEASE STOP, people with good karma posting this crap is going to make me have to start browsing at +3.