Post
Nobody understood what it was, including the people buying it for Christmas.
The Wii U launched in 2012 as the successor to Nintendo's wildly successful Wii, but it was doomed by catastrophic messaging. Many consumers thought the GamePad tablet controller was an add-on for the existing Wii, not a new console. The name 'Wii U' reinforced this confusion. Third-party developers abandoned it almost immediately due to weak hardware and poor sales projections. It sold just 13.56 million units lifetime compared to the Wii's 101 million. However, the Wii U produced genuinely excellent first-party games like Super Mario 3D World, Splatoon, and Bayonetta 2 that most people never played.
Example
Nintendo's own marketing was so confusing that retailers reportedly had difficulty explaining the product. A 2012 Jimmy Fallon segment where he played the Wii U left viewers genuinely unsure whether it was a new console or a Wii accessory. Many Wii U games were later ported to Switch, where they sold dramatically better because people actually owned the hardware.
Why it matters
The Wii U is the ultimate proof that marketing and naming matter as much as the product itself. Nearly every design idea in the Wii U, asymmetric gameplay, a portable screen, off-TV play, was validated when the Switch executed the same concepts better. The Wii U was the right idea with the wrong execution and the worst possible name.
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