Legend11 said:
Drop a brandname they spent billions establishing? That makes no sense. I was going to comment on the rest of your post but it's all armchair quarterbacking and nobody knows if any of those suggestions would have changed anything. |
Sorry for the late reply. You're right of course, I am just speculating, but I think they're fairly sensible points (of course I made the points so I would). As for the name though, it's billions of dollars of wasted marketing in Japan. Usually we call this throwing good money after bad. The fact is after the failure of the first system, the Japanese gaming majority looked down on anything Xbox. I've heard many a Japanese gamer say that even though they know it's a good system with good games, they'd never buy one. Even among the hardcore. That's how powerful the negative branding is. It's worse than the old European perception of Nintendo: Not Cool.
Microsoft needed a fresh start and they needed to dissociate with their old branding. Notice Nintendo never calls it "Nintendo Wii", just "Wii"? That's because they recognised the negative connotations associated with 'Nintendo'. I think the Sega branding idea sounded good actually.
