Our engineers, designers, and AI researchers are hard at work getting Heroes built and ready for release. As the release date gets closer and closer, you’ll be glad to know we are well underway in making preparations and plans for our launch and rollout, which is exciting. Heroes is going to be the biggest update we've made since the original release of AI Dungeon. It represents a monumental inflection point for our product and company, and as such we have started thinking about the rollout of Heroes and how it will work alongside AI Dungeon.
Why the name “Heroes” won’t work
We’ve run into a pretty important question. What do we call this thing we’ve been referring to as “Heroes”? A few things have become clear:
The first is that the name "Heroes" has been a great pre-release code name, but as we've looked into trademarks, domain names, and market analysis, we’ve realized "Heroes" is a name that won’t work longterm. Unfortunately it’s not unique enough to be trademark-able and has a few other issues. When we first started using the name "Heroes," there was an implied assumption that eventually we would come back around and start exploring names for real. That time is now.
Second, as we think about the relationship between "Heroes" and "AI Dungeon," we are seeing the importance of having a branded platform name. What does that mean?
Currently, "AI Dungeon" is both a game experience as well as a platform. The platform allows you to create, share, and discover content from other players, and then allows you to get into the game experience. When we launch "Heroes," we expect it to leverage the same platform as "AI Dungeon" does, so that you can find and discover great content from creators or become a creator yourself and share content with our community.
Today, the line between platform and game is not clear or defined, and we think that may need to shift. This is a major strategic question for the company: How do we want to position our company, our platform, and our game engines and experiences in the market? What is the relationship between those entities, and how do we talk about them in a way that’s clear and understandable to our players and other audiences? Adding a major new version like "Heroes" is going to break the pattern that we've used to date.
Keep it Simple
We believe that the name we give Heroes should also become the name of our platform and our company. This would allow us to avoid the complexities that come from “brand hierarchy” and rightfully put the spotlight on creators’ content to shine inside our ecosystem.
For example, let’s come up with a pretend new name for our Heroes/platform/company. How about…Elara? (I want to be very clear: this is just for illustrative purposes; this is not being considered.)
Which sounds more natural?
- “Check out my world ‘Secrets of the Crypt’ on Elara!”
- “Check out my world ‘Secrets of the Crypt’ which is on Heroes on Elara!”
Clearly, keeping it simple is better. The worlds or scenarios you make could have been created in Heroes, or AI Dungeon. But, you’re finding and interacting with them through the platform, which we’re pretending is named Elara in this example. Elara can have different experience types.
There are still many questions to answer about how this will play out. We’ll be sure to involve you in the process as we explore ways to answer those questions.
Why our current names don’t work
We already have some names at our disposal: AI Dungeon, Heroes, Latitude…heck, even Voyage. Why don’t we use one of those?
As I mentioned, this is a major inflection point for our company, and the name we use needs to support our vision for the next 10 years and beyond. We want a name that is memorable, easy to spell, encompasses our vision, sounds great, is approachable to a wide audience of users, and is a name we can trademark and protect.
We’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about our vision and what makes us different. We keep coming back to three main pillars:
- Story—we believe immersive narrative and story are the most important properties of a fantastic experience
- Agency—we want players to be able to make any choice and decision, and for those decisions to have meaning and consequence
- Creation—we want to enable people to create and share worlds with rich lore and depth
As we look at the existing names, they all fall short:
- AI Dungeon—Very descriptive, but also narrow (strong fantasy bias). The connection to story only makes sense if you’re familiar with D&D and misses the elements of creation. Also, we are still going to be using the AI Dungeon name within the platform experience.
- Heroes—Commonly used in gaming so it doesn’t stand out. Can’t be trademarked or protected. Has stronger connotations to the spirit of adventure than it does out our key pillars of story, agency, and creation.
- Latitude—We’ve struggled with trademarks for this name. It also sounds more like a tech name than a game or platform. Doesn’t score as well for sound symbolism. Connections to our core are distant and vague at best.
- Voyage—Another hard to trademark word. Has similar connotations as Heroes to adventuring. The sound symbolism is quite good with Voyage, and it’s easy to spell. But we ultimately need something better aligned with our mission and unique enough to trademark.
One thing you may pick up on here is many of the names we’ve used in the past are rooted in fantasy and adventure. We’ve realized that while these are great themes, they don’t fully capture the breadth of the experiences you can have on our platform and games. They can be fantasy, but they can also be sci-fi, or slice of life, or horror, or cozy, or post-apocalyptic zombies. Because of that, you’ll likely see us shift more and more towards story, agency, and creation over adventure and fantasy motifs in our branding.
Where do we go from here?
We are already in the middle of a naming process. We’ve been approaching this from several angles.
First, we have gone through exercises to help us explore our company's values: what we stand for, what makes us different, what we believe in, and what value we think we are creating for the world.
Second, we’ve been educating ourselves about what makes a great name. We’re exploring sound symbolism, analyzing word spellability, and doing mini case studies of company names we admire.
Third, we’re conducting market research to determine our position relative to other players in the space. This includes learning more about various audiences, interests, and demographics. We want to ensure that our message is clear and unique compared to other companies in AI, gaming, and user-generated content.
As of this writing, we’re still gathering feedback on some names that we believe have potential. We hope to share one or two of them with you all in the coming weeks for input and feedback.
If you have any feedback for us on the process we’re taking, our vision and brand, or anything else, please let us know. As we launch “Whatever-We-Name-Heroes-But-Definitely-Not-Elara”, we want this to be a name that honors everything we’ve built together over the years and also looks forward to all the incredible things to come.