Duskfade. DUST: Origins. Dust Front RTS. Duskbloods. Dungeons of Dusk. These are all games that will be released in a 12-month period. I know the differences between them, but I'm convinced that no normal person would be able to remember all of these titles.
Dungeons of Dusk gets a pass, because it's a spin-off of a rad FPS that led the boomer shooter revival movement. That's easy enough to remember. Duskbloods is the new FromSoftware game, so there's no chance anyone will forget that.
But, I will pick on DUST: Origins and Duskfade. Want to know the origins of dust? That stuff gathering on your monitor and shelves? Dead skin (and other debris). That title stirs nothing within me, even though the game has some solid development pedigree behind it.
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.
So many video game names are either daft, interchangeable, or confusing. I got thinking about this because of a great thread by Hannah Flynn, communications director at Failbetter and a games marketing consultant. She's previously worked for brands like Penguin Books and Tate in the UK.
"Put aside what you think a game name should sound like," the advice reads. "There are thousands upon thousands of games on Steam now. Not all of them are named well, and there are weird trends which actually make your name less effective. Start with your game!"
That is surely the number one problem with most game names: people look at other games' names and try to pick something that sounds a bit like them. The result is often a flavourless mush that struggles to stay in the memory. To an outsider not already well-versed in the games marketplace, these often sound ridiculous.
The dust/dusk-relevant nugget I particularly like in Flynn's thread said to watch out for "filler" words like:
- "fall of" (11,527 results on Steam)
- "echoes of" (2,750 results on Steam)
- "shadow of" (8,243 results on Steam)
No offence to the developers of DUST: Origins, but 'origins' is absolutely of those words.
"There isn't a universal formula [for a good game name]," Flynn summarises. "But I like to think that a good name reflects the spirit of the game, and doesn't go out of its way to be un-memorable." She offers plenty of examples: Hades, Clickolding, Dave the Diver, Failbetter's own Sunless Skies.
This all resonated with me because I've been writing about games for 19 years, and I've seen a lot of bad game names in that time. A former colleague of mine used to bring up the games Violence Fight and Faster than Speed as being classically terrible titles for games—but those names are actually funny, whereas I think bland or generic names are much more annoying and widespread. In the Xbox 360 era where everyone wanted their version of Call of Duty or Gears of War, these proliferated.
Name that game
I decided to ask Flynn a bit more about the hypotheses shared in her thread, hoping to dig into the unhinged thought process behind every game name that ends with 'unleashed' or 'chronicles'. "I've thought about this more than is reasonable," Flynn says.
"I've been making indie games at Failbetter Games for 12 years, and have also reviewed hundreds of Steam store pages for other teams. I've developed this interest in game naming out of a professional need, but also because I'm getting older and my memory is getting worse, and I'd like to be able to recall the names of games I want to play."
I empathise with Flynn's point on age. One test is whether you can still remember what a game is called 10 minutes after you saw it announced in one of Geoff Keighley's showcases. Sorry *checks notes* TARAE: The Unbound, but even though I watched that trailer just one month ago at Opening Night Live, my memory had flushed that one away before the livestream was even over. A bad game name can trip a developer at the starting line.
When developers look to other games to name theirs, "The possibility space spirals in on itself, and suddenly everything's called Rise of the Bonelord: Origins of Dust," she says.
"It's a fragment of a broader insularity in the industry. You can tell when games are only inspired by other games. I'm a big believer in looking to history, art, science, performance, nature, comics and pretty much everything else as inspirations for both making games, and naming them."
The reason a decent name matters, of course, is that we've got more of the things to choose from than ever. It's another way to make your game visible in the morass.
"Steam is a very densely populated platform these days," Flynn says. "To catch people's interest you only really have the name of your game and the capsule art, and there's only so much they can do. It's really an artform to create both and make them work well together in a way that stands out."
I asked GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless about this topic, who offers a slightly different take. "I think it's important that developers pick a name that's not too long and convoluted, and won't be immediately confused with another game. (The Outer Wilds vs. The Outer Worlds being the most famous of those name clashes.)
"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.
Form vs function
So what defines a good name? "A good name sells the game's vibe," Flynn says. "The feel of how it'll play. There are loads of ways to be successful at this. It could come from a well-known phrase, an idiom, a place name, an artefact, a character's name, or just a concept that reflects the game's theme." Flynn cites a workbook called Don't Call it That, which has helped shape how she thinks about this.
"Finding the right name should feel like a jigsaw piece slotting into place, not that you've completed a 50-step escape room. Big Walk is about having a big walk. If you can, let the game name itself."
This got me thinking about whether the titles of my favourite indie games from the past few years were able to capture their essence. A few certainly did. Ball x Pit? That's a perfect name for that game. Dispatch? The word by itself isn't that evocative, but that does describe the basic act of what you do in the game, and it's simple enough to be memorable. Mouthwashing? That's a cleverly subversive name because it asks the question 'why is it called that?', which the game does pay off.
I think Carless' band analogy is apt—a name can seem clever in retrospect because it has already become iconic. Balatro is a good example of that to me. If LocalThunk's game had 10 reviews on Steam and was completely ignored, I'd probably call that a bad name. Few normal people, after all, would know that Balatro means 'jester' or 'clown' in Latin.
Flynn, though, points out that Balatro is actually a good game name by a few different criteria. "Balatro is a great case study. It's another word for Joker, which gets the seal of approval because it's historical and specific to the game. It's an alt-joker name for an alt-joker game. On the other hand its definition is comparatively little-known, even now, so it does have a slight whiff of thesaurus-digging.
"But! It's a jolly word, fun to say, easy to spell. It also comes from an established tradition. Puzzle-y games can get away with single-word names because of related media like board games (Ludo, Cluedo, Catan, Boggle) and traditional puzzle formats (Sokoban, Sudoku, Rubix). The fact that Balatro is called Balatro places it confidently in that tradition, versus calling it something like Crazy Jokers: Number Go Up, which overexplains the point and ultimately undersells the game to the kind of person who'd be into Balatro."
Flynn points out, too, that the name is so catchy that 'Balatro-likes' is now a widely used term for a whole range of roguelikes. Crazy Jokers-likes doesn't quite have the same ring.
"I think the name of a game can be the difference between someone remembering your game and having it disappear into the ether," says game trailer expert Derek Lieu. "Even if you ignore the fact a very generic name is less likely to show up at the top of search results, a title which sticks is just one more thing that can help it stand out."
Lieu praises SUPERHOT and Unpacking as elegant and memorable titles.
"'A Little to the Left' I think is a brilliant title because it's charming, has nice alliteration, and communicates the game's concept," Lieu adds. "'Tiny Glade' is great because it includes both scope and setting. 'Tokyo Jungle' I love because it's two words which don't belong together and I can't help but be intrigued."
The colon police
Concise game names are key, then, but many developers have succumbed to the temptation of throwing in some fancy punctuation and a rubbish subtitle.
"Game names with colons are for series, editions, and DLC," reads Flynn's thread on titles. "Don't give people two names to remember." Confidence is key to avoiding this.
"I think for indie teams, they're afraid of choosing one name and sticking with it," Flynn says about the temptation to dabble with Game: Subtitle naming conventions. "Usually, either side of the colon could work as a name on its own, but uncertainty wins out and they end up diluting their impact. In the end all they're doing is asking players to remember two names instead of one."
It's worth pointing out, too, that few of Flynn's rules are absolute, and that extends to colons. "There are times when you can use a colon without displeasing me, the colon police." A sequel with a returning main character, DLC, ultimate editions—Flynn says those all make sense.
Sometimes a subtitle can also be descriptive, which is useful to the player on a platform like Steam. "I love the name Iron Nest: Heavy Turret Simulator. The subtitle is in the game's name on Steam, so it clarifies what you're doing, but the key art just has this really impactful Iron Nest naming."
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.
Carless says that there are some cases where a descriptive but unflashy game name only does the developer a favour in finding the right audience. "There are a small amount of cases when you can actually use SEO in the name of your game, e.g. if it's a farming game and you can stick 'farming' in there. But in general that's not possible. And... I don't think generic names are always bad if they have the right connotations. For example, if you make a job simulator game, I'm a fan of putting the word 'Simulator' in there. It anchors it…"
There's no precise formula to a great name, then, just an extensive series of best practices to avoid common mistakes. To turn Carless' band analogy on its head: you know a bad name when you're looking at it (Hoobastank). Tapping into the essence of what your game is, and not getting too preoccupied with what other developers are doing, seems like a sensible starting point.
"I hope that when people name their games, they do at least block out 5-10 possibilities and have a serious discussion about it," Carless says. "The first name you think of shouldn't always be the game name."
