There are a few of those, but their rarity arguably helps them stand out more.

I’ve only played the first game, and they for sure mention Zero Dawn.

You picked excellent titles and called them forgettable, one of which was a textbook example listed in the article as to how to choose a good name for a video game. You “proved” that picking good titles for video games helps them sell. Your choices for “forgettable” titles were, in my opinion, so bad that I’m surprised you didn’t list a top tier title like No Man’s Sky. And besides, Horizon: Zero Dawn is a successful video game, at least in part, because it doesn’t have the same discoverability problems that the developers do that are targeted by this article and Failbetter Games. I merely listed it because it came to mind with the criticisms about trying to start a new franchise with a colon like the other examples in the article.

Your listed examples would get far closer to proving the opposite, as I said in that comment chain.

See the article’s debate over adding the colon to the first entry in a series, and I basically share the same viewpoint. If the first entry was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, it would have been much harder to solidify itself with people learning of this thing for the first time. See my comments elsewhere in this thread here with Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun as a first entry for a series that didn’t take and how I don’t think Horizon aptly describes its game or story.

Look, it wouldn’t have been a huge improvement to just call it Zero Dawn, but at least you get past the gore of the unnecessary colon they talk about in the article. All three of the words in Horizon: Zero Dawn probably have a high hit rate if you’re searching for titles on Steam, but getting rid of the colon would still have made it a more interesting title.

I did pull those as examples of bad title trends called out in the article, but the likes of Sony can muscle past problems with a bad title by throwing money at it, and if you’re just one of a few dozen indies in the middle of a Keighley showcase, you don’t have that luxury.

The games are very memorable, despite their extremely forgettable name. Its really that simple, not sure how you could misunderstand that.

That is what I understood your argument to be, to which I said, paraphrased, “These titles you listed are extremely good and memorable, and I think it’s crazy to call them bad or forgettable names”, to which you said, “Exactly that’s what I’m saying.”

In the course of this thread, you just claimed to make two contradictory points, that these titles were both very memorable and very forgettable, like you were arguing both with and against yourself.

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. That’s my case anyway. “Horizon” seemed a bad fit for that game’s title.

Respectfully, that makes no sense.

No, those games are partly successful because they’re all quite excellent titles. Cyberpunk 2077 is a little hokey, but it’s because of the license it’s attached to, and it at least immediately conveys what the game is. I think you chose some of the most memorable titles in recent years and called them forgettable. Big Walk was even listed in the article as a positive!

I don’t mean to throw any shade, but you chose a list of some of the best titles this medium has put forward in recent years as examples of forgettable names. That, in part, explains their success.

That orders of magnitude difference is why it can be so hard to remember a game with a bad title that might otherwise be up your alley though.

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.

Rise of the <noun>

Shadow of the <noun>

Tomb Raider did both of them.

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…

It doesn’t read that way. Seems to just be which current sales are shown front and center rather than manually setting them by promotional deals or otherwise.

I think the intention is for stores/distributors like Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Valve, etc.

Oh, nice. Monkey Island is definitely a gap in my gaming experience, but I’m not sure I have much patience for adventure game moon logic.

My wife spent about $130 for a year subscription to a service that she figured would always have her favorite show on it, because they own that show. Then like 10 seasons of it left for an exclusivity deal on another service. This was a contributing factor to pushing me into self hosting. Some of it is saving money, but some of it is also making sure you actually got what you paid for.