With the abundance of indie games which seem to pop up faster than Bollywood movies, how do the indie game developers come with new, unused game names? Just invent something and google for it, and if there are hits to other games by the same name, change the order of words or something?

Sure, you might think we'd never run out of game names, but that's what people said about IPv4 addresses.

From one indie bundle discussion, I saw these game names mentioned (all completely unfamiliar titles to me):

Cardinal Quest
Black Market
Kenshi
Steel Storm: Burning Retribution
Demise: Ascension
Wanderlust

So from there we can make up more names for the next batch of new indie games:

Black Quest
Cardinal Kenshi
Burning Steel: Storm Retribution
Ascension: Demise
Wunderlast

and so on.

With movies, IMDB and others are using the year as part of the name to distinquish similarly named movies, maybe that's the answer to this big dilemma? E.g. "Black Quest (2012)"? So far there seems to have been surprisingly small amount of games with the same name, but now it seems to me the number of released games has exploded with indie, and mobile, games. This is going to get confusing as heck, and soon you'll have no idea what game you are actually playing.

Anyways, I'm off. Happy Easter! (and don't take this too seriously)

Naah, we'll just move into made-up names, like "Kingdom of Amalur" or "War on Kashyykk". Infinite possibilities, there...

And if we run out, the old names will be reused (as has happened quite a bit with series-reboots)

Aliens vs Predator comes to mind. God, that remake is shocking.

edit: That's exactly what I thought of when I purchased Alien Zombie Megadeath yesterday.

Actually the number of possibilities is just the 'cardinality of the symbol set used' raised to the 'length of the name'-th power, which is finite if the symbol set and the name are finite :p
So there are only 308915776 six letter purely English alphabet names without spaces.

I wonder if there's already a geeky website somewhere on the net offering different tables for rolling up a brand new title for your game with your trusty collection of roleplaying dice or something. Like:

STEP 1

1. Zombie
2. Alien
3. Monster
4. Faerie
5. Treasure
6. Loot
7. Nuclear
8. Dungeon
9. Ancient
....


STEP 2

1. Quest
2. Adventure
3. Legend
4. Story
5. Tale
6. Master
7. Dawn
8. Defense
9. Killer
....

STEP 3 (optional)
1. of
2. with
3. in
4. vs.
...

STEP 4
(use another list or return to STEP 1)

There could also be a joker in one of the lists, asking you to discard your current title and replace it by a simple one-liner description of the game type / gameplay / the feeling you get when you play it.

Make up names which have nothing to do with the gameplay (heaps of Japanese games do this) :P

Nah there's plenty more numbers for sequels & that's mostly all the big companies put out nowadays.

P.S Nuclear Master sounds sweet.

Story of Loot

O M G

Take every game title so far, aside from The Elder Scrolls, and add "Scrolls" somewhere. The recent Zenimax incident showed that there is a very surprising lack of titles with that work.

edit: If you happen to come across a game called The Elder then don't do this.

Considering that Notch got a letter from Bethesda about calling an upcoming game "Scrolls" yeah I can see it becoming an issue for some people.