"Areum" is not as Unique as we Hoped

One of the biggest changes to Areum recently has been a new name.

Choosing a name for a game is always a difficult process, and this one took us a couple of weeks. I consider us fortunate that it didn't take longer!

First off, let me explain the reason why we renamed the 2D MMORPG project. I want to make it clear that everyone on the team loved the name. Unfortunately, it came to my attention that "Areum" is the name of a South Korean idol singer. This might not have been too bad, but when I searched both Twitter and Google, the results were flooded with information about her.

Why Change Names?

Having your brand obscured by another brand of the same name is never a good thing for a business. For one, it makes it difficult to find information about your brand. If your own pages are as deeply buried as they were for us with the name "Areum", people are likely to just give up looking.

Another issue you run into is that your brand name has very likely already been taken on various social media websites. This was certainly the case for Areum, I am sad to say.

A related "problem" is that people who are looking for the other brand may find yours instead. From a publicity standpoint this might not be so bad: Free advertising, right? But it just increases confusion, and there is no guarantee that people will be interested in both brands.

Choosing a new Name

So, on to choosing a new name. The three of us drew up lists and lists of potential names, circling the ones we liked the best. But this was only part of the process: For every potential name, I had to check if it was already taken by another game. I also had to make sure that it was it would show up in search results.

But that wasn't all: I also had to make sure that the name did not translate into anything offensive in another language. On that note, I also had to make sure that the name did not translate into another brand.

All of these checks needed to be "fuzzy", which just made things more complicated. In other words, I needed to make sure that I checked variations of the name and possible misspellings. I also had to check words which were phonetically similar.

That last one actually saved us at the last minute more than once! There were several occasions where we thought we had found a good name. However, we then discovered that it sounded like another word with an unfortunate meaning.

Settling on the name Volund

After two weeks of this, we were no closer to finding a new name for Areum then when we started. That's when someone on the team, I forget who, suggested using the name "Volund".

For those of you who are just joining our community, I need to explain some history real quick. IfThen Software created an MMORPG named "Volund Preview 1" and released it four years ago on April 10th, 2010. After releasing Preview 1, we moved on to other projects. The server was eventually taken down due to limited resources.

A lot of worldbuilding has already been done for the Volund universe, so this would open up a lot of new options. This sealed the deal for us: Volund would be the new name for Areum,  the medieval fantasy 2D MMORPG project.

We are all very excited to revisit the Volund universe! There are a lot of cool ideas that we are itching to try out.