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A something of something... game names

Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
A lot of really vacuous advice in this thread. You are giving the man a lot of gut feelings and vague generalities but almost no specific advice.

From the dev's question we can assume he is trying to come up with a marketable title to boost sales of his game. That means we are dealing with numbers, which demand an empirical approach. Fortunately, this sort of financially data is easily quantifiable and readily available; it is only logical that for a shot at an all-time top seller, he should name his game Minecraft.
Most of those games had mass marketing campaigns costing millions of dollars behind them, far more valuable than the game's name.
In the case of Minecraft, Notch shilled it everywhere in substitute of actually having a real marketing campaign. Notch shilling it on /v/ became a meme unto itself. Not to say that Minecraft isn't a decent enough title of itself, I suppose.

If you want an example of what title to use solely for marketing purposes, you'd be better off looking at indie titles that had medium-levels of success.
 
Self-Ejected

RNGsus

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fb_img_1506495332103.jpg
 
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A lot of really vacuous advice in this thread. You are giving the man a lot of gut feelings and vague generalities but almost no specific advice.

From the dev's question we can assume he is trying to come up with a marketable title to boost sales of his game. That means we are dealing with numbers, which demand an empirical approach. Fortunately, this sort of financially data is easily quantifiable and readily available; it is only logical that for a shot at an all-time top seller, he should name his game Minecraft.
Most of those games had mass marketing campaigns costing millions of dollars behind them, far more valuable than the game's name.
In the case of Minecraft, Notch shilled it everywhere in substitute of actually having a real marketing campaign. Notch shilling it on /v/ became a meme unto itself. Not to say that Minecraft isn't a decent enough title of itself, I suppose.

If you want an example of what title to use solely for marketing purposes, you'd be better off looking at indie titles that had medium-levels of success.

"Blood rack barbed wire
Politician's funeral pyre
Innocents raped with napalm fire
Twenty first century schizoid man"
King Crimson, 21st Century Schizoid Man

Rusty Shackleford took a long drag from his cigarette, his dry lips puckering around the stub of rolling paper in a practiced motion. The night was lit up by tracer shells and screamed with gunfire. A click to the north-west, the sprawling slums surrounding a shattered city burned like Inferno upon the earth.

The master scout had seen enough. The OpFor would pay for this.

He folded the stock of his assault rifle and set off through the muggy jungle to rejoin his unit. The weapon, just like the cigarette, was cheap and imported. Being somewhat of a marksman, Rusty preferred to use a battle rifle, preferably one outfitted with a solid bipod and a dependable optic, but the OpFor's constant harassment of the Nation's supply trains had left them with little choice in arms.

Although the scout could make it back to base with his eyes closed, the jungle never ceased to feel thick and endless. Between the constraining overgrowth of its flora and ferocious wailing of its landlords, that ruled their sunless kingdom even as explosions sundered the earth but a horizon away, Rusty could not help but reminisce. How many comrades left him to rest in the soil beneath his feet? And before, through time stretching back before the creation of the jungle itself, how many bodies did this suffocating ground claim?

The rattle of a snake from somewhere up ahead cut through his rumination. Where other men would've thought the sound as nothing more than one more voice in the chorus of the wild night, Rusty picked up on its barely perceptible artificiality immediately. Almost automatically, he went down on one knee and, drawing up the hem of his fatigues' pant leg, produced a nearly identical sound by tapping his knuckle upon the wooden handle of the blade concealed in his boot.

"Shackleford," the darkness spoke with his comrade's voice. "Losing your touch? You were fraction of a second too slow."

"Stone," the gravely-voiced master scout replied. "That's how long it took to draw on you with my other hand. Your pitch was off by half an octave. Any more and we wouldn't both be standing here, talking like old pals."

Argon Stone said nothing in response, but simply smiled as the legendary scout passed him on his way to the headquarters.

But Rusty could not reach the HQ when he ran into Colonel Hard McLusky's regiment.

"Sir, OpFor took the city," the scout reported.

"Master Scout Rusty Shackleford, at ease. And that's bad news," the colonel's face was tense with restrained worry, "but I've got worse. Come, we're going to the ridge."

***

It was almost dawn when Rusty, Colonel, and his regiment - dubbed the Hard Men - arrived at the edge of the peak overlooking the only road leading from their field headquarters back to the Nation proper.

"Sir, with all due respect, what in the hell are we doing so far away from the front line?" Rusty demanded to know.

"Master Scout Rusty Shackleford," the Colonel's voice was calm but stern, like a sea before a storm, "outside of desperate circumstances I would have surely fragged you on the spot for such an irreverent tone. Unfortunately for the lot of us, our circumstances are desperate indeed. Take a look at tree line past the road, and tell me what you see with your famed eagle eyes."

Rusty didn't have to squint to see them - three kilometers away, camo'd up in black and their guns the same, dozens of tiny, deadly silhouettes stalked around, some bringing heavy satchel charges ever so closer to the supply route - less than a minute, the scout noted, before the arrival of the morning reinforcement convoy! "OpFor, trying to flank us!" he cried out, and immediately emptied his magazine at the enemy, felling thirty-one saboteurs with his deadly precision.

The Colonel ordered his Hard Men to open fire, and they were quick to suppress the enemy...but not before a bright red light screamed across the air towards their positions.

"Master Scout Rusty Shackleford!" he screamed, no longer calm yet every bit as stern, "take cover - and that's an order, soldier!!"

Yet Rusty did not take cover.

For the first time in his life, staring down an incoming rocket-propelled grenade, Rusty froze...

...blinked...

...and with a whoosh, the projectile went past him.

"I can't believe it. It went right over my head."
 

Nortar

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Pathfinder: Wrath
I'd say simplicity is just as important as the meaning behind it.

Going down the list of games in my steam library and picking a few out(either because bad or good):
  • Aarklash: Legacy. Terrible! What is an Aarklash? Why does it have a legacy?

Aarklash is the world's name in Confrontation, a French tabletop wargame.
To people familiar with the source (probably the bulk of targeted auditory) it's not more puzzling than "Sword Coast Legends"
to ignoramuses only knowing Forgotten Realms and that only thanks to Baldur's Gate.
 
Joined
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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut
I'd say simplicity is just as important as the meaning behind it.

Going down the list of games in my steam library and picking a few out(either because bad or good):
  • Aarklash: Legacy. Terrible! What is an Aarklash? Why does it have a legacy?

Aarklash is the world's name in Confrontation, a French tabletop wargame.
To people familiar with the source (probably the bulk of targeted auditory) it's not more puzzling than "Sword Coast Legends"
to ignoramuses only knowing Forgotten Realms and that only thanks to Baldur's Gate.
if you're trying to market something, using a name most people know tends to help, yes. Otherwise, don't do it.
It's why Lord of the rings games get away with it so much -- the names they use are well known.
 

PompiPompi

Man with forever hair
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RPG Wokedex
Then also some names can be remembered shortened.
For instance "A Gif of War" can be written as AGOW
 

d1r

Busin 0 Wizardry Alternative Neo fanatic
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Then also some names can be remembered shortened.
For instance "A Gif of War" can be written as AGOW

Do you know what a "gif" of war is?

A declaration of war against good taste.
2021-09-16-11-36-53.gif
 
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Wunderbar

Arcane
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Nov 15, 2015
Messages
8,809
Picking a concrete name is a terrible idea. You don't want to limit your potential game series by having a specific location/genre/tone in the title. Look at those suckers at Bioware, they named their game "Baldur's Gate", and then the sequel had nothing to do with the city of Baldur's Gate. Or "Fallout - A Post-nuclear Role-playing Game", good job pigeonholing yourself into an RPG genre, thank god based Todd removed that sub-title when making Fallout 3.

A perfect name for your game should be very abstract. Like "Divinity". Or something ...-nity.

Someone at Obsidian, probably.
 

J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
I wonder if this is what the internal debate about the title Divine Divinity looked like.
 

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