Yo,

I consider myself first a musician, and I've had a lot of experience naming songs. Somehow, without my noticing, my brain has created a nice checklist of whether something is a good song name. Recently, though, while trying to think of a name for my project, I realized it's a completely different checklist for naming a game. My game has a specific somewhat dark feel to it, but song names I would have thought of to fit that same mood sounded absurd when applied to a game.

I realized I have no idea what goes into thinking of a name for a game. Most games nowadays, including the games all you guys are working on, have succinct, catchy names, but then again, who really cares? Has anyone ever bought or not bought a game simply based on the name? Isn't gameplay, graphics, and maybe even cover artwork significantly more important?

What say ye?

There had been Games that i haven´t touched for long years just because of their unspectacular title, just to find out by pure incident, that they were Good.
Then there were a lot of Games with an brachial and straightfoward name that just were craptastic.

Naming a Game is indeed very difficult and has a lot of influence on the famous "First Impression".
There are no General Rules for naming games, because these would change with every Game itself.
A Game always got my attention, if the Title is very wierd and unusual. And a relatively provoking title can sometimes help, given that the Gamecontent can efford the provocation with its quality.
Fantasywords\Names are not always a good choice, because everyone who doesn´t know your Gameworld can´t imagine anything of it. In those cases the games are heavily dependent of some really good and explaining Artwork.

In our world naming is very important in every aspect of life i know some people whos names sound funny and they have hard time with it just bcoz there parents chosed that (i cant stop laughning whenever i remember our first day of IT class when 1 guy introduced himself and told teacher his father's name hahaha and the worst the teacher got it wrong and made it sound worst hahaha it made the day of all of us). Take it for movies songs games or a project the name must give a good impession.

Start with a tacky WIP name if you can't find a good name within a considerable amount of time. It is lost time that you could have spent on working on the project .

The problem is, I use the name of the Project as prefix. Eg. all iAtoms classes and global (evil) variables have the prefix "atms" and for Trafiken nu the prefix was "TN".
A later change would destroy everything

One word names are better than 2 or longer word names.

"The ..." is bad, goes under.
"S..." is bad, too many others too.

Starting with Aa or a number will help to keep the Game present
at the beginning of Online-Lists / Collections.
(AaaaaaAaa! was a smart Choice...)

The name should not use non standard English characters (ä ü etc)

Next to the name, the title-screen / Teaser Picture / Logo is
THE most important artwork in the whole game.
Its often the first and only Artwork seen by users browsing
a list.
I wonder Why Artists often rush this out before the release.

I'm definitely not agree with that... what about half life?

Uhm, where in "Half Life" is a ü, ä, ö or ß? I also see no other non english characters like something japanese or in cyrillic

I tried to post the letter that HALF LIFE used in its name here on forun, but I only get this λ
Any way, the letter I mean is non standard English letter, and used instead of A in name (HALF LIFE).
As well as it used on every Half Life's splash screen.
Here it is any way:

Look at the icon and at the way Valve write Half Life...

@3run: that icon is a lambda, a character in the greek alphabet.