On the name of the game

Originally posted on cohost: 04/12/2023

I want to talk a little about the name of the game (Final Profit). Choosing a name is one of those things that comes after a project is starting to shape up, and it's something you agonise over.

For a long time my project files were labelled as "Fourth Income Game" as it was the 4th iteration of trying to make the shop mechanics feel good. At some point that evolved into "Final Profit IV" as a bit of a joke between the playtesters and me that it was Final Fantasy-ish (very ish).

Some time later the time to pick a real name came when I was gearing up to start getting the word out and a big list was made of possibilities. I don't know if I have that list anymore but they're not important as the discussion with my friends kept coming back to "Final Profit" feeling right.

It could be that we'd become accustomed to the name and couldn't see it as anything else anymore (as I hear happens a lot in this scenario) but I also think it was intuitively a really good choice. It's easy to google, it sits in a comfortable place in the Steam library right among the Final Fantasy's (and particularly near 14), it's used as a real business term so has a thematic connection, and taken literally it's Biz' primary goal. To defeat capitalism is to dismantle the profit incentive and we're attempting to do that by taking it to an extreme, hence Final Profit.