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Comment by jacobush | Hacker News Reader

And Wii U would have succeeded, had they called it something else. Most people were like, oh a "Wii"? Got one already, check, keep browsing for Christmas presents...

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Product differentiation was a big problem for Wii U. At one point a friend of mine asked me how much a Wii would sell for, this was well after the Wii U launch. I asked "Wii or Wii U" and she said "What's a Wii U?". The Wii U Gamepad failed at delivering the play however you want, whenever you want, experience that the Switch successfully executed on. It was the right direction but the implementation wasn't quite useful enough. I wouldn't have bought a Switch if I couldn't play it as a handheld, for example.

Yup. Scumbags broke into my house and stole my Wii-U (among other things). Insurance kept quoting me for a Wii... Had to correct them on numerous occasions.

Also true, but my main point was that they even managed to miss the people who always buy the latest and greatest gadget for their grandchildren. Free money. On the table.

Interesting argument, but it doesn't explain how MS and especially Sony get away with it every few years.

The Xbox and PlayStation appeal to a different audience, one more in tune with how gaming works. The Wii appealed heavily to non-gamers.

PlayStation is easy. One, two, three, four. Not hard to tell the difference. Xbox is a bit stranger, but still easy to tell apart because against its numbered and we’re used to numbered things being different from each other.

But Microsoft is headed down a Wii U-like path with the Xbox One... even as a gamer (who admittedly doesn’t own an Xbox), I have no idea if the Xbox One S is newer than the Xbox One X or what the difference actually is, and it’s not intuitive that the Xbox One S is actually appreciably different than the Xbox One other than being smaller.

Sony may find themselves in a similar pickle if people stop buying PlayStation 4 games because they’re unsure if they work on their PlayStation 4 Pro Or vice versa.

At this point I'd argue Sony/MS are like the General Electric of the gaming industry - a huge whale making a ton of products used by the industry at large, but not products anyone thinks are actually that innovative or interesting. The PS4 basically wins almost by default given the size of the installed base, and it has the titles a sizable slice of the market care about.

I hardly play any video games. When I heard about the Xbox One X, I figured it was the successor to the Xbox One like the Wii U is the successor to the Wii, but I found out that it's actually a high-end version of the Xbox One. It can be confusing!

Agreed. It wasn't until about a year after it was released that I realized it was a different system. It seemed like a new controller for the original Wii.

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