Again please forgive any english syntax mistakes (you may PM me if I made some mistakes so I won't repeat them forever ;) )

Product naming.

It may not look really important but actually I wouldn't be surprised if it's very often one of the most determining factors between a success or a failure..and it's a bit of a shame.

Why?

Not really because an attractive name will mean more sales (it's true to some extent but it's not that important actually). It's more because the first letter of your product's name will determine its position in the shareware listings (most of them are sorted alphabetically).

Many authors have understood that and have named their product something like "123MyGameName".

Let's say an user browses the Puzzle games listing on a site. There will be something like 30 pages. I doubt he will actually go further than the 3rd page. I doubt he will actually try the games with a name starting with a 'C' and "higher".

I would be curious to know the download stats of games starting with an 'A' or a number versus the ones starting with other letters.

What do you think?

I think the name of a game is important, but not for shareware list rankings.

We have been noticing a pattern which we call the 'duh' factor. Do people see the name of your game and get what it is about? What sort of expectations does the name of the game set up in the end user?

As an example, and name as generic as "Alien Hunter" will attract more players to the demo than something like "SmogBodge". Alien Hunter communicates to the player what the game migth be about. It sets up expectations of what I am about to play. SmogBogde is a name I probably would not remember, pronouce correctly, or recall properly when telling a friend.

I personally looks at list and look for something that pops out at me. Could be the name or the marketing screenshot, but I seldom try things at random starting from A.

The data might prove me wrong, I am just stating my observations and feelings on the subject.

There are a lot of things you can do to make your game stand out. The name is the first part of that.

As Joe mentions, you need to have a name that "suggests" what it is. Giving a clear signal about what the game does or is trying to achieve is a great start.

Lets think of a few...

Puzzle Pirates - great name

Rocknors Bad Day - poor name

Thing is, you need to select the name that is going to suggest the right things to the customer. Is it an action game? than have some action term in the name. Is it a puzzle game? have some logic term in the name.

Al Reis's "Positioning" is a good one for this.

.Zoom.

I don't think most people browse listings by game name that much, so the alphabetical thing isn't so useful... Most places list newest-first, which makes the most sense for showing off what a visitor to the site hasn't already seen.

If I did try to browse game listings and got pages and pages, I'd just resort to the search engine and be probably hunting for keywords more than titles. :)

Important things in titles that haven't already been mentioned...

The Google Factor. You want your title to be easy to spell, remember, AND something that there aren't already a million hits for. Naming your game after a popular joke or phrase may amuse people but it could make your game hard to find when searched...

(However, submitting your game to download.com does mess with term ranking a bit and can catapult your use of the phrase above everybody else's use of the phrase, so that's not hard and fast, I'm just guessing.)

Yes, there are lots of those sites that just list everything alphabetically. I think that's bad because many people browse games instead of searching for a specific keyword and they'll just start looking at games starting with a "1" or "3D" etc. Some sites do have the option to sort by popularity or date, but unfortunately use alphabetical order as default (even TUCOWS).

I'm sure it does help to have a name starting with a letter from the beginning of the alphabet. On download sites that aren't catagorized well, you can often see quite a difference in numbers of downloads between the games on the first page and those on page 50 or so.

I think that product naming should be considered not just on a product-to-product basis but as part of a whole-business strategy.

Your first products, when your company has no reputation or following, should probably always be named distinctively and informatively. Scott Miller, founder of Apogee, once recommended in a blog entry to stick to character names that you can shorten to one word in a pinch: "Keen," "Max," and "Duke" all conjure up images of video game characters. That's a good long-term branding strategy, but at the outset I think it's more important to get eyeballs to look at your game. My in-development game is called "City Explorer" because it was one of the first things that came to mind to describe it, and it brings together some strong imagery that relates directly to the gameplay.

If you're making an abstract puzzle game, you unfortunately don't have those kinds of advantages. Large videogame companies like Nintendo or Sega have a tendency to first build branding through their game characters(Mario, Sonic, Pokemon, etc.) and then leverage that branding to sell mostly unrelated games(puzzles, sports,racing). We can do the same, but we have a harder time of it since we can't put out as many games; slowly building up the brand will require a lot of patience.

You can "trick" people with names that sound appealing but imply something different from what you get; for example, you name your game "Reckless Driver" and then make it a slow-paced puzzle game vaguely involving cars, but that might work against you by hooking the wrong sort of person for your game.

Edit: (Oops on Miller's name :P Those late-night posts of mine...)

Scott Miller :)

Yes, the name should really invoke a certain reaction.

I'm not 100% sold on Scotts positioning entirely, but obviously it seems to work for them, so I'm not going to discount it entirely.

I just think theyre being overly simplistic with it.

Try and keep it simple, punchy, easily shortened AND preferably with something in the name that suggests what it will play like.