Guide:Choosing a title

The Importance of a Title

The title is arguably one of the most important parts of your game. When people recommend the game, they will be speaking or typing the title. Thus, the title of a game must be easy to remember, easy to type, fit the vibe of the game, and—arguably most important—easy to search for. If a player runs a Google search and finds forty games with similar titles, yours will get lost like a blue bottle in an ocean.

Let's run through each of these points right now:

Easy to Remember & Type

A title must be easy to recall. If your game title has many words or many uncommon words, it will be harder for a player (even a fan!) to remember all of them. Additionally, a good title should be easy to type. If it's too difficult to type, players might write it incorrectly or remember it wrong, destroying any good will your game could have.

Vibes

"Vibes". I think it is a wretched word because of how vague it is. Still, the point is that a game title should give the "idea" of the game across. A title, like cover art or a plot summary, shows off the game's theme and intent. A cute romance fantasy game should not have a title like "Sapph1c R0mance 29" unless it involves some sci-fi elements. A title denotes intent.

Easy to Search For

Right now, I want you to open a private/incognito/inprivate tab in your web browser so you're not logged into anything. I want your browser to have no search history. Now, search your game name in Google. I do not care if you do not like Google search personally; most players use Google, so that's the algorithim you should care about. Put your search in quotes like this: "Video Game Title".

You should see something like this:

What appears? Is it a lot of results, or is it sparce and sporadic?

If your game was named something generic like "The Sad Truth", the results page would show tons and tons of results. Your goal is no results or very few results. That way, you will be liklier to dominate the search engine optimization (SEO). Obviously, you cannot control a search engine entirely. If a project comes out later that's more popular and uses a similar name to yours, there's nothing you can do. But stacking the cards in your favor from the start is always a grand idea!

As a sidenote, it doesn't particularly matter if your game domain is available (domain thieves sniping domains is not as important now as it was ten years ago), but I would suggest at least running a search of your game name through trademark registries like the United States Patent and Trademark Office. You want to make sure no one else has trademarked the game name, even if you don't intend to!

Conclusion

The last thing you can and should do is ask. Ask your friends, ask your family members, whomever you want. Ask them if they like the titles you give. Personally, I ran through probably forty titles before I settled on one I liked for my commercial game. I kept a list on my notes application (Google Keep) with just titles and would think of new ones sporadically, jotting them down.

Put the effort into your title. It deserves it.

Your game does, too.