Chris Kohler over at Game|Life a Wired blog has the most rational take on Nintendo’s new brand. He says, “Of course, I expect the Internet to brim over with toilet humor; that is what the Internet is for. But the Internet is not real life … In short, the fuss over Wii is an Internet Problem, not a Real Life Problem. In real life, the name’s soundalike will pass almost entirely without notice. The positives of Wii will vastly outweigh the negatives.”
I seriously doubt you will see a single potty joke in any of the mainstream media coverage of this anouncement.
Chris also uses a reader’s comment from one of his previous posts on the subject to bolster his point, “Talking to people that have worked in games retail, you find that normal people can’t/don’t/won’t keep the names of the systems straight. People ask for “PlayStation 360s” and “PlayCubes” and “Mario on Xbox” even though they actually own a GameCube ”“ to them the system names are confusing and completely interchangeable.”
Finally, Chris goes on to say that Nintendo doesn’t really care what gamers think, “Nintendo has decided that if they had to choose, they would choose the vast market of non-gamers and not the smaller market of core gamers … If you’re feeling enraged, picked on, or left out, I highly encourage you — as I would have encouraged you yesterday — to go out and buy an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. If Nintendo is right, and I think they are, you’ll end up with a Wii anyway.”
Once again, what do you think? Is the Wii branding a sign of the immaturity of the Internet as a medium, or a major blunder?