Top of mind for me after reading this article is that Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet should just be called The Heretic Prophet, and Horizon: Zero Dawn should have just been called Zero Dawn.
<NOUN>FALL.
Why so many Steam games have weirdly similar (and forgettable) names
Submitted 2 weeks ago by ampersandrew@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/why-so-many-steam-games-have-weirdly-similar-and-forgettable-names/
Comments
Katana314@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
tal@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
There was an earlier era, when <NOUN> hadn’t been already taken.
Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Yep, roguelikes are roguelikes, because there was literally a game called “Rogue” way back in 1980: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)
Feathercrown@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Empirefall
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Rise of the <noun>
Shadow of the <noun>
Tomb Raider did both of them.
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Shows the name doesn’t matter at all to be memorable or not memorable. It’s the popularity of the game that makes the name memorable, not the other way around. Also with your example in the post “Horizon: Zero Dawn should have just been called Zero Dawn”, how would it be more memorable? Horizon is a catch word to have with all their games in the series, for easier recognition with later releases. It makes perfect sense for a game series that is planned to be like this, and perfectly memorable.
The game quality makes names memorable, not the other way around.
garretble@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This is the one that grinds my gears.
I have an ongoing joke for these games in my friend discord where anytime one comes up (because there’s always one in a gaming showcase) I put
“<NOUN>fall, yet another game in the long running -fall series.”
My headcanon is that they all are in the same universe.
Soggy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Ok but Titanfall gets a pass.
creamfresh@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I asked GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless
Talking about names, that is a very Unamerican family name.
tal@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
I strongly suspect that the surname predates the automobile.
searches
www.familysearch.org/en/surname?surname=carless
Carless Name Meaning
English (Staffordshire): variant of Corliss .
SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org 2 weeks ago
I strongly suspect that the surname predates the automobile.
It was obviously "Cartless" in older times.
Napster153@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Where’s the Cat Distribution System when you need it?
Mordikan@kbin.earth 2 weeks ago
Because now you can build it into a franchise. Intergalactic: <INSERT_TITLE>
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah, but Flynn’s suggestion (and I’d very much agree) is to save that for the sequel. You’ll get a much more memorable title for your first entry, and then you can market off of that. If I might retroactively ruin a few other series that way:
- Half-Life: Mysteries of the G-Man
- Ghost: Tsushima
- BioShock: Fall of Rapture
- Diablo: The Battle of Hell
- PUBG: Battlegrounds…wait a minute…
warm@kbin.earth 2 weeks ago
Player Unknown's Battlegrounds Battlegrounds is such a weird case. The name was stupid to begin with, everyone ended up just calling it PUBG. Then they rebranded to PUBG being the company name and the game name, but then slapped Battlegrounds on the end?!
tal@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
I’d rather have numbered titles in the series so that I don’t have to memorize the order.
sbbq@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Horizon : Zero Dawn is a terrible title. Zero Dawn is only marginally better.
BigPotato@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Wild Hearts and Sayonara Wild Hearts are not in the same series. Tales of Zau is not a part of the Tales of Series. Just look at how many games are Z something or something Z.
Why bother with reinventing the title wheel when you can just hope that you’ll have a subset of buyers that purchase expecting a different level of quality?
albbi@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
The Outer Worlds & Outer Wilds are pretty hard for me to differentiate.
Feathercrown@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah this one gets me
Gerudo@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
What throws me on Wild Hearts is they also have a stylized W icon that screams Witcher to me. It always throws me off.
flamingos@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Duskfade is a perfectly pleasant 3D platformer with Kingdom Hearts-style combat that came out a couple of months ago. Once I’ve finished typing this paragraph, however, it will once again erase itself from my memory, because there’s nothing evocative about the name.
I feel that says more about the game than the name. Like I find (scrolls through Steam library) Bullet Witch is a more memorable name than say Portal, but I can tell you a hell of a lot more about the latter.
“Beyond that—I actually think that naming isn’t that important, since most people buy a game based on video footage, someone else playing it, or a recommendation. And we’ve seen in music and elsewhere that weird names are in no way a blocker to becoming successful.” Carless cites Steely Dan and Bananarama as examples.
Do people really look at the videos on Steam? I always immediately click past them to look at the images.
Failbetter’s next game is called Mandrake—the result of lots of collaborative longlisting, Flynn says. As well as encapsulating horticultural and sorcerer-type themes, it’s the name of the game’s main character.
This would be like if Esoteric Ebb called itself ‘Cleric’, though given Wizards of the Coast is publishing a game called ‘Warlock: Dungeon & Dragons’ I suppose it wouldn’t be that out there.
Good article though.
Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Do people really look at the videos on Steam? I always immediately click past them to look at the images.
I watch them for any gameplay footage.
madmantis24@lemmy.wtf 2 weeks ago
I browse the Steam Store images-first, like you do. I would guess that is a generational habit, though and anyone older or younger probably favors the gameplay videos over looking at screenshots because they weren’t conditioned by the early Internet days where watching any video online was a serious commitment
Feathercrown@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I disagree that bullet witch is more memorable than portal although bias and the fallacy of trying to remember unmemorable games is making it very hard to tell if that would still be true with other titles. My instinct is that uncommon, distinct words (Portal, Watchtower, Celeste) are more memorable than combinations of words that compete against each other rather than forming a whole (Bullet Witch, Star Fox, Crash Bandicoot: Twinsanity). Although now that I do have examples… I have no idea, honestly it doesn’t seem super correlated.
flamingos@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Yeah, I’m not sure either tbh. I can think of quite a few things that make a name forgettable (eg noun of proper noun), but I can’t think of anything that would make a name memorable other than it just being memorable.
Just as a aside, but I will push back on portal being an uncommon word. It’s more common than chess.
Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Duskbloods is the new FromSoftware game, so there’s no chance anyone will forget that.
Oof, I had already forgotten it before they mentioned FromSoftware. It sounds like a teenage vampire drama…
Piotrex@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
A distinctive name only helps if people can remember its spelling. I’d rather have a short, searchable title than another pair of generic fantasy words.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
Horizon: Zero Dawn should have just been called Zero Dawn.
It should have been “Horizon.” That’s the game’s series title. And since it was the first one, it didn’t need a subtitle at all.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Zero Dawn was a thing in the game’s back story that explained how everything came to be. Horizon was a throwaway word in a monologue toward the end of the game, and they probably also risked brand trouble with Forza: Horizon, which predated it.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
Fair. And also, naming things is hard. I am numb to it by now; video games have always tended to have goofy, nonsense, or boring names. Tho, back in the day, we just assumed it was a translation thing considering a vast majority of the games in my youth were made by Japanese developers.
“Metal Gear Solid, huh? That’s certainly a name.”
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Most game name are uninspired and forgettable on its own. The success and being popular makes them so memorable. Classics like Super Mario World wasn’t particular inspired name at the time it came out. Super Metroid or many other Super games had this issue. The games itself made the names unforgettable, not the name.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
When Super Metroid came out, you could basically count every release that came out in a year across all platforms. That’s not possible anymore. There are probably plenty of great games we haven’t played because the marketing was done no favors by their titles. To name one off the top of my head, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun. Blades of the Shogun is an excellent title, but they wanted a larger Shadow Tactics series that never came to be. That studio didn’t see enough success to survive even 10 years after that game’s release, but they saw good reviews.
Armok_the_bunny@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
1994 had at least 360 games for the SNES alone. Include PC games and it becomes basically impossible to find actual numbers because of poor archival and sheer volume. Yes, there are more games today, by at least a few orders of magnitude, but there has always been a large volume of frankly slop.
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Look at Mixtape… The name is hardly special, but the game is widely known and recognized (as good or bad), not hidden gem. My point is, game names aren’t memorable because of their name; game names are memorable because of their popularity. Especially RPGs have often unspectacular names.
More (relatively… little a lot relative) recent games that became hits or known, despite their forgettable names: Blue Prince, Big Walk, Cyberpunk 2077, Starfield.
BaraCoded@literature.cafe 1 week ago
Lack of inspiration, lack of strong artistic direction, lack of creativity in general, and maybe the curse of american titles which are often ultra dumb and straightforward to a fault, foreboding the shallowness of their themes.
CovertOperative@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago
Let’s just be glad video games aren’t named like manga/anime are and we have “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” instead of “I slept for 100 years after the world was destroyed and now have to face the demon king”.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
my favorite game growing up was, “Italian plumbers take too many mushrooms and go on a rampage through the kingdom to save the princess from the evil turtle”
although a close second was, “I am trapped in a dark maze with drugs and now there are ghosts chasing me?!?”
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There are a few of those, but their rarity arguably helps them stand out more.