Product Naming Case Study: The 3DS

Naming products is a difficult process. An ideal name is short, memorable, an undisputable trademark, has no easy way to mock it, doesn't mean something bad in common languages, and it embodies the key features and positioning of the product. It's an extraordinarily difficult feat to achieve all of those goals, and correspondingly rare. Usually names fall short, sometimes far short, of more than one of those points. Even less-than-stellar product names can take many hours of work to create and approve.

One aspect of of product naming is that a product name can also turn into a negative factor, sometimes merely by chance. Usually this happens when you move a product to a foreign country and find the product name doesn't work. A classic example is GM trying to sell the Chevy Nova in Latin America, but "no va" in Spanish means "it doesn't go", which is a less than useful association for a car.

Nintendo's most recent hardware has had some interesting names. Back in the early days, they stuck to pretty straightforward names that were easy to remember and obviously had no trademark problems: The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The Nintendo 64. All had the company name as part of the product name, so it was clear what company was making it. These products reinforced the meaning of Nintendo as a key gaming brand. Although the N64 didn't really say it was a game machine, by this time the word Nintendo was so strongly associated with gaming the point was made.

Next up was the GameCube, which was descriptive to a fault. It really wasn't an exciting or evocative name, and didn't point to any product benefits. Yet Nintendo's brand by this time was plenty strong enough to compensate. Subsequently, Nintendo choose to find a readily trademarkable name that had some unusual resonances: The Wii. This was probably the most radical name in Nintendo's history, and it attracted a great deal of commentary (much of it negative). Again, though, the power of Nintendo's brand carried the company past any negatives, and the best-selling hardware shut up detractors pretty quickly. After all, if it was selling like hotcakes who cared what they called it?

The Gameboy was a little bit odd for America, but the overwhelming success of the product eventually transcended the relatively weak name. (Weak because it really didn't point to any product benefits, and seemed a little off-putting to half the potential audience.) The Nintendo DS was a fairly obvious name to point to the device's main differentiation: the dual screens.

Now we come to the Nintendo 3DS. I'm sure that when Nintendo was working on the prototypes, and somebody said "What will we call it?" somebody quickly suggested "Nintendo 3DS!" Sure, the device has glasses-free 3D display, and it's basically an advanced version of the DS. At that time, too, 3D was making a resurgence. James Cameron's Avatar was setting box-office records, and the movie industry was making plans to have 3D in every theater, with every movie being in 3D, as a way to get people to come back to theaters to get something they couldn't get at home. (And, not incidentally, charge them a lot more.) Meanwhile, TV manufacturers realized they might have a way to get people to buy new TVs even though they might have just bought an HDTV in the last year or two. And game publishers, watching console game sales sinking, saw the possibility for a new technology that could revive game sales and be relatively easy to add on to existing consoles.

Nintendo was in desperate need of a sales boost, too. A new handheld device riding the wave of 3D enthusiasm seemed like the perfect answer. What better way to ensure that the device was associated with the 3D craze than to put 3D in the name?

The upside to the 3DS name seemed clear: The name clearly associates the device with 3D, and thus with the enthusiasm for 3D being generated by the movies, TV makers, and the game industry. So the 3DS name should help boost sales by some amount. Perhaps no one even mentioned the possible down side: What if 3D turned out to be just a fad? Or, worse, if 3D actually turned out to be a negative feature for customers? Then the name might be a drag on sales, reminding customers of a feature they don't like or don't care about, and making it seem like the device is all about that feature.

Of course, this is exactly what has happened. Satoru Iwata realized this early on, and noted in public statements that the device wasn't all about 3D and that you could have non-3D games on it. But if you leave your little 3D slider in the off position on the 3DS, you're left with a DS that is clunkier than a DS Lite and has about 1/3 the battery life. At least, it still has more horsepower, and when you're not using 3D the main screen is a fairly high resolution. The lower price tag is going to help significantly, too, by showing that you can get the extra features with paying a huge amount more than you would for DS.

I expect that a new version of the hardware is in the works, at least to make it less expensive to produce, and possibly to add a second analog control, improve the battery life, and maybe make it slimmer and lighter. This is a natural evolution that console maker inevitably work on (at least, the part about making the device cheaper to produce). I think Nintendo will be looking closely at possibly rebranding

This is a cautionary tale for marketers, though. Naming is a two-edged sword; think carefully before you hitch your product's success to single feature or a pop-culture craze. That may be OK if your product is only going to be on sale for a few months, but if you expect to be selling something for years you need to take a longer view. A blander name might not give you an initial sales boost, but it may also avoid a sales problem. Nintendo's done pretty well in the past with names that are not terribly exciting in and of themselves, but they let the quality of the product add value to the name. And some solid marketing spending, too. Marketers, take heed.

TeePee: A Social Game Finder

With so many games these days, it's getting harder and harder to find the ones you might like. Of course, businesses are springing up to help with this. TeePee is a startup designed to help find social games. It's built a discovery engine to help analyze your likes and dislikes to suggest games that might fit your tastes better. TechCrunch calls it a Pandora for games, which is a pretty good description.

They plan to expand beyond Facebook games into mobile and other games, too. Developers are asked to register with them to get your games into the listings. I have no idea if this service will take off, but any game developer should be spreading the word about their game by any means they can these days. Signing up for services like this, where the only cost (so far) is a little bit of your time, seems like a worthwhile effort.

There's no magic formula for making your game a hit; if someone offers to sell you one, back away slowly with your hand on your wallet. About the only things you should count on is make a great game, and market the hell out of it, and you'll improve your chances of success. So when you see something like TeePee, go ahead and give it a whirl.

Downloadable Revenue For EA Hits 20% Of Sales

Electronic Arts CFO Eric Brown's been talking about the company's download revenue at conferences lately, and he's released some facts and figures. So far in 2010 EA has raked in $750 million in digital sales, compared to $430 million last year. Brown expects digital sales to account for 20% of revenue this fiscal year, and to be a major factor in future sales growth.


That's not surprising given how regular game sales have been for the past couple of years industrywide. It looks like 2010 will end up being about 8% lower in sales through traditional channels than last year's sales (which were down from the previous year).


EA expects to bring in as much as $100 million this year from full-game downloads. Which no doubt causes a little heartburn for GameStop and other retailers, which is why they're not losing any sleep when publishers complain about used game sales. Really, though, if EA didn't sell full games via download, then Steam would just take more of that audience. Digital sales are inevitable. Blizzard must have done quite well with Cataclysm sales via download, as the lines were down substantially at retail stores over expectations. Which is not great news for the PC market at retail stores, but Blizzard probably doesn't care.


The interesting thing about EA's experience is that much of their sales come from digital add-ons, like the FIFA Ultimate Team mode where players can buy trading cards that let them add players to their team for a few games. Some whales (borrowing the gambling industry's term for big spenders) spend up to an astonishing $700 on these card packs. FIFA 09 brought in $15 million from these trading cards, and FIFA 10 brought in $30, and FIFA 11 looks to bring in $40 million. The cost of developing those cards is a million or two, so this is a very profitable area for EA.


We can see the relentless advance of alternate monetization schemes continues. All of the high-growth areas of the game industry are in non-traditional areas; the classic console game is in the second year of lower sales, and 2011 doesn't look any different. Opportunities are expanding for small developers, but taking advantage of those opportunities will require new ways of doing business.

Used Games Triumphant

We've heard a lot of publishers complaining about the used games market, which has been mostly GameStop up to this point. In the past few months word has come out of used game efforts in 7-11 and Walmart, handled through a rack jobber. Now the situation is accelerating, with both Target and Best Buy announcing used game programs. Not great news for GameStop, especially in Best Buy and Target offer reasonably competitive amounts for the buyback.... because instead of just using the credit to buy games, you could be buying all sorts of other things. Flexibility is worth a lot to consumers.

The greater impact is to the console game publishers. Now it's looking like nearly 50% of the retail outlets for video games will be offering some sort of game buyback program. This means even more downward pressure on new game prices, and lower sales numbers since people will have more opportunities to buy lower-cost used titles. It all adds up to a very grim Christmas, with no recovery in sight for sales numbers.

Expect the publishers to respond with more efforts to get money from consumers, like charging for online access or going to subscription models. The development model is also going to be a target; with sales numbers dropping, 3-year development cycles look awfully long and expensive.

It's a great time to be pushing free-to-play games and low cost mobile games... if you have those. If you don't, it's way past time to be putting those together.

I believe that logo up above is on the backs of video game publishers...