To be the wet blanket, no, Nintendo did the right thing because they learned their lesson from Wii U, and to a lesser extent from the New 3DS
It’s not about the players, it’s about who buys it, and the ones who buy it are parents and adults who aren’t always up to date on gaming news.
PS2, PS3, PS4, PS5. That makes sense, you want the latest one? Buy the bigger number.
Wii U? I already have a Wii at the house, the kids don’t even use it. It’s a tablet? They already have a tablet though.
New 3DS? I already got a DS and they tricked me into the 3DS! I don’t even need the 3D feature, that was a waste of money. It’s still pretty new, I don’t need another new one.
I worked at GameStop all those releases and I can’t emphasize just HOW MAY TIMES I had those conversations with customers. Not just parents either, but casual consumers.
the theory i like to believe is they saw everyone call the xbox 360 “the 360” so they assumed if they called the new xbox the xbox one everyone would call it “the one”
Why do you assume that them using the name meant no one noticed? There’s a non-zero chance the person who came up with the name was trolling the company and deliberately set that up. Stranger things have happened, like the phalluses on the Little Mermaid poster art.
There’s also a chance that some marketing people came up with it, higher ups liked it, then didn’t appreciate anyone pointing out the name they like had a potentially embarrassing abbreviation and would respond negatively to that. Or maybe they already had a culture of people pointing out things like that getting flak for it and anyone who noticed just stayed quiet. Hell, I could easily see that kind of culture being established when people objected to all the actual deliberate anti-features MS has been adding over the years.
So much silliness in this thread, I love it.
To be the wet blanket, no, Nintendo did the right thing because they learned their lesson from Wii U, and to a lesser extent from the New 3DS
It’s not about the players, it’s about who buys it, and the ones who buy it are parents and adults who aren’t always up to date on gaming news.
PS2, PS3, PS4, PS5. That makes sense, you want the latest one? Buy the bigger number.
Wii U? I already have a Wii at the house, the kids don’t even use it. It’s a tablet? They already have a tablet though.
New 3DS? I already got a DS and they tricked me into the 3DS! I don’t even need the 3D feature, that was a waste of money. It’s still pretty new, I don’t need another new one.
I worked at GameStop all those releases and I can’t emphasize just HOW MAY TIMES I had those conversations with customers. Not just parents either, but casual consumers.
Xbox was confusing too eventually.
Nobody got confused on Playstation.
Xbox started looking at 14yo’s gamer tags and thought that was a good naming convention:
“XboxoneX”
I’m still not over the fact that not ONE person at Microsoft said “Really? We’re calling it the XBone?”
the theory i like to believe is they saw everyone call the xbox 360 “the 360” so they assumed if they called the new xbox the xbox one everyone would call it “the one”
Why do you assume that them using the name meant no one noticed? There’s a non-zero chance the person who came up with the name was trolling the company and deliberately set that up. Stranger things have happened, like the phalluses on the Little Mermaid poster art.
There’s also a chance that some marketing people came up with it, higher ups liked it, then didn’t appreciate anyone pointing out the name they like had a potentially embarrassing abbreviation and would respond negatively to that. Or maybe they already had a culture of people pointing out things like that getting flak for it and anyone who noticed just stayed quiet. Hell, I could easily see that kind of culture being established when people objected to all the actual deliberate anti-features MS has been adding over the years.