Theming, Marketing, and Player Expectation
So I've gotten on a focused tangent recently about how games market themselves to the public and can sometimes undercut themselves when linking their games themes to their marketing direction and wanted to rant about it.
The basic idea is that games that have certain words or imagery in them are mainly going to attract players of certain genres, and if your games genre doesn't match the player expected genre you are turning away your core audience for an audience who doesn't actually have interest in your product.
The words Rogue and Survivor are generic words that mean something specific to players now. If you make a stealth game about a thief and call it Knavish Rogue you might get clicks from people who like roguelikes, but when they figure out it's a story based thief-like they'll move on, or if you make a survival crafting game called Planetary Survivor and you get people who are looking for things like vampire survivors. At the same time people who are tired of those two genres see your name and assume it's one of those and never click on it.
Cooking can be another one. I've seen a few action platformers, hack and slash games, and friendslops where cooking is the theme of the game, but when most players see the most forward-facing marketing material such as steam capsules and game names rather than screenshots they'll make the assumption that it's some kind of cooking business sim, or a chef making combinations to order game. Food games often fit near the calm or cozy space of games, rather than games focused around hunting and gathering materials.
I think having certain themes to incentivize and contextualize interactions for the player is valuable, but if they do not match genre expectations then perhaps they should be withheld from being part of the core identity of the product from a marketing standpoint. Just seeing a trailer or screenshots can show the theme because then it sits within the context of the genre, but because many people rely on first glances from lists of tens or hundreds of new games putting those ideas within the capsule or game name without making the genre of game crystal clear can set marketing off on the wrong foot.
Let me know what you think of this concept, whether I'm overthinking a situation where a good game will push past first glances and pass more word of mouth anyway, or whether it's valuable to consider how one presents perceived genres down to this level of granularity.