In the recent "Minions of Mirth" thread I criticized the title, saying that it might negatively impact sales of what looks to be a pretty amazing indie RPG. I think my personal issue with the name is not so much that it's "bad", but that it may not do the product justice. Someone released a wargame several years ago with the unfortunate moniker: "Wargasm". I was too embarrassed to even pick up the box. It sounded like some kind of porno game, and I figured that if the marketing department had to stoop to a gimmicky name like that they were probably compensating for a bad game.

There are certainly lots of successful games out there with horrible titles, and this all raises an interesting question: how important is it to find the right name for an indie game? Is it more or less important than for a commercial product? Word of mouth, number of reviews, and download count are surely MUCH bigger factors, but does a bad name make it harder to get noticed, and to get the buzz ball rolling?

One advantage commercial games have is that people generally see the name in context. (On the front of a box, or as the title of a review.) When people go to download.com all they have is a name. Does that matter much? I'd be curious to hear what other people think.

I'm glad you started this thread. It's an interesting topic.

I personally don't think there's as much in a name as some people like to think, but I'll be interested to see what other people have to say :)

Generally, if you give me a long list of names, I choose a name that sounds good to me. Although, now that I'm thinking about it, I couldn't say what criteria I use to judge a name. Next time I have to make a choice, I'll write down the names that look interesting and the ones that don't.

If there is any other information available, names become less important. Especially when there is a screenshot.

'Minions of Mirth' did at first strike me as an odd name, but not in a negative way. Quite the contrary, it made me curious. I think *because* it's such an unusual name for an RPG the potential exists to draw people who might not otherwise be inclined to look at it. Then again, maybe my judgement is clouded because I've been following Josh's progress since before he announced a title.

What's interesting though is that the title makes sense in relation to the game. Mirth is a character stat. There's a discussion about it in the forums at the Prairie Games site. From that perspective, it's a clever title. Once the game is released though, the trick is getting people to see the connection between the game and the name. If they are turned off from the beginning they may never get to the site, or finish reading the ad/article/what-have-you.

Then again, Josh is gathering quite a following just by going out and visiting various RPG and Quake engine sites. There's a bit of buzz surrounding the game already, so word-of-mouth may likely negate any adverse effects the title may have. He's really hit on to something. If we could all be so lucky.

The point where the title becomes important, IMO, is when the game is one among many. When it's surrounded by a gaggle of similar games at Real Arcade or some affiliate site then I would think that the title is one of the first attractors (behind page positioning/top lists). I know that's what I'm looking at as I scan the list for something that stands out. If the title doesn't, I'll likely never see the screenshots or read the blurb (unless I'm really bored). And I would consider myself less critical and an easier sell than the average buyer since I'm in to the indie game thing myself. I could be way off base, though.

So for MoM, I don't think there's a worry as it really stands alone. I think the 'Massively Single Player Online Game' phrase gives it a boost above shoulders as well. It will be interesting to see how it fares when it is released (Feb '05 I believe he said) - and I predict it will more successful than PG hopes. They're already getting preorders this early on, so that's a positive sign.

Game names are usually the province of the Marketing types not Developers, probably for good reason. :D
So without too much experience in that area, I'd guess that while a good name wouldn't necesserily persuade to buy, but a bad one could put people off.
I agree with John, if your customer has to choose between your game and another then even the slightest thing could put them off.

To trivialize John's example (yes I remember that title as well), if a customer has to choose between two RTS games, one's called "Wargasm" and the other's "Command & Conquer", both are RTS games and the customer hasn't read any reviews on them. I think C&C would win simply because of the others name.

if you change "Wargasm" for "Total Annihilation" then I think it becomes a lot harder to choose.

Interesting topic :)

Since it's about marketing it should be over at the buisness board.

The topic itself came up several times so far, but I was unable to find the threads. The search function seems to be somewhat broken eg searching for "name" in the title didn't yield any results (it should have at least shown this one). Oh well...

Picking a good name is really difficult. Most of the really good names were already taken. Things like "doom". Oh and beware the generic stuff - no one can remember em. If it's a real word be sure that most non native speaker knows it's meaning. "toroidal" would be one of those you shouldn't take. With a word list of the 10000 most used words it's easy to avoid em.

http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/Papers/top10000en.txt

The worldlist, I posted before, isn't that great. Most likely it was generated by parsing several news and pc related pages... eg it contains "sharon" but there is no "evil".

yeah I noticed that :D
and it has words like PC, C, etc far far higher that I would have thought, I guessing it's quite an old one as it has Soviet in as well :)

I think it's good to generate some word lists by parsing alot of related text. Eg tons of sci-fi ebooks for a sci-fi game.

Hm... but it's fun to take just two words which are next to each other as a title for... something...

Virtual Summer (*)
vendor's dot-matrix
reconsider withdrawing

(* I'll pick that one if I ever make a hentai game)

I think a decent name is important... well, its at least important that its not a BAD name (as mentioned - wargasm). With that being said, my space-invaders/arkanoid project is currently called INVADAZOID... :D whatdaya think?

Virtual Summer (*)
vendor's dot-matrix
reconsider withdrawing

(* I'll pick that one if I ever make a hentai game)

those are some excellent titles!

There are some great name generators available free on the net. Just google "name generator". There are hundreds of them. It's a great way to get ideas.

Good name generators aren't hard to do, just use N-Grams and store the probabilities for a dataset. doesn't take much work and you can generate reasonably decent names on the fly and in game, a la the original Elite (or better if you have a very good dataset).

But I do like some of the combinations in that list
President Share

if you got to 3 words next to each other you get things like
United as Soviet
Bush National Police
Mr former Monday

Names are incredibly important, marketing wise. Here's a few links to a blog run by Scott Miller of 3D Realms. He makes excellent points on the topic of names:

http://dukenukem.typepad.com/game_matters/2004/02/the_name_of_the.html
http://dukenukem.typepad.com/game_matters/2004/04/dumb_name_no_di.html