Naming a browser game when every good name is taken

Here is a rule we learned the expensive way: a game page can only rank for its own name, and in a popular genre that name is almost certainly taken. The licensed games we host will never rank — their titles and copy are the same bytes every other portal serves. Our own games are the only pages with a chance, and a name someone else already owns throws that chance away before the first line of code.

The one that took four tries

One of our merge-drop puzzles — the one now called Wellfall — went through four names:

1. Corefall. There is a game on Steam with that name.
2. Fusewell. Free, and it was the working title for a day.
3. Fusefall. Picked to rhyme with our arcade dodger Voltfall. This was the worst option of the lot: there is a game with that exact name in the same exact genre on a phone store, another on a game-jam site, and a well-known animated-series property one letter away.
4. Orbfall, Stackfall, Fluxfall, Prismfall — all in use, one of them published on a portal larger than ours.

Wellfall returns no game anywhere, and it splits cleanly into WELL·FALL for a two-tone logo. That is the whole reason it is the name.

The others

• ScaleSling was picked from three candidates that were all free. The obvious one, Trollfall, is a published tabletop adventure.
• Husktide shipped as something else first and was renamed off four other games sharing that title — three of them in the same genre. A player who searches the old name lands on someone else's game.

How to check before you commit

Run the candidate through all of these. An exact match in any of them, especially in your genre, means pick another:

• A plain web search for <name> game.
• Each phone app store.
• Steam, and itch.io.
• A trademark search in your territory (in the EU, the EUIPO database; it is free and takes two minutes).
• The name with your genre's noun attached — <name> merge, <name> tower defense — because that is what a confused player will type.

If the name survives all of that, it is not just legally safer. It is a search term that returns you, which in a genre with fifty near-identical games is the only organic traffic you are going to get.

Why it is worth the afternoon

Renaming after launch is not a rename. It is a dead page where the old name was, a set of broken inbound links, and every portal listing pointing at a 404. We did it once and it cost a week. Spending an afternoon on the name up front is the cheapest SEO work available, and in this category it is also the most effective.

The nine we got right are on the originals page.