Why so many Steam games have weirdly similar (and forgettable) names

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• Katana314@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  <NOUN>FALL.

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  • tal@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    There was an earlier era, when <NOUN> hadn’t been already taken.

    • Soccer

    • Boxing

    • Backgammon

    • Empire

    • Grand Prix

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    • Ephera@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Yep, roguelikes are roguelikes, because there was literally a game called “Rogue” way back in 1980: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)

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  • snooggums@piefed.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    AUTUMNFALL

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Rise of the <noun>

    Shadow of the <noun>

    Tomb Raider did both of them.

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    • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ 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.

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• flamingos@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ 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.

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  • Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net ⁨55⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ 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.

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• sbbq@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Horizon : Zero Dawn is a terrible title. Zero Dawn is only marginally better.

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• Mordikan@kbin.earth ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Because now you can build it into a franchise. Intergalactic: <INSERT_TITLE>

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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…

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    • tal@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I’d rather have numbered titles in the series so that I don’t have to memorize the order.

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    • warm@kbin.earth ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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?!

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• Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ 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.”

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• BigPotato@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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?

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  • Gerudo@lemmy.zip ⁨38⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ 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.

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  • albbi@piefed.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The Outer Worlds & Outer Wilds are pretty hard for me to differentiate.

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• Ephera@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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…

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• thingsiplay@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • Armok_the_bunny@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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