DEEP DIVE
What’s the Deal with .io?
You might have stumbled across a bunch of games with “.io” at the end of their names. What does it mean?
To find out, you’ll need to rewind a few years to when an incredibly popular game called agar.io hit the scene. The goal of the game was to consume a set of smaller orbs and avoid the larger ones. Each of these circles represented actual players somewhere in the real world.
“It started with me just playing with the way I could render cells,” said agar.io creator Matheus Valadares, explaining how the wobbly motion of cells under a microscope was his initial creative spark. “I thought: ‘Hey, that looks cool. Let’s make a game with those.’”
In just a few short months, agar.io’s rapid popularity inspired a slew of new .io games from other developers that retained Valadares’ principles: they were all generally very accessible games with simple controls and goals.
Valadares’ next game continued the trend he started in agar.io. In Diep.io, a game that took only a couple weeks to develop, players level up and battle tanks in a simply designed, persistently multiplayer arena.
Success changes the game and player strategies, and this is key to the .io design. “The more successful you are, the bigger a target you become,” he explained. In agar.io, and in games inspired by it, you grow larger and stronger than other players the longer you survive. On the flip side, being big and powerful makes you more attractive to your opponents, because the rewards for your demise are huge.
In slither.io, one of the first .io games to arrive after agar.io, players maneuver a snake as it grows to unwieldy sizes. hexar.io puts players in an arena of six-sided tiles to try to claim larger clusters by drawing perimeters around them.
The more successful you are, the bigger a target you become.
Matheus Valadares, creator of agar.io
Crash of Cars, a multiplayer game that landed on the App Store this year, can be considered a ‘.io’ game even without the branding. It combines all the aesthetics and upgrades it with a rich visual experience. Its multiplayer combat continues that simple .io goal of dominating the opposition, while enhancing it all with stunning graphics and impressive effects.
“Like Agar.io, they’re generally very accessible games with simple controls and goals,” Valadares said. “The more successful you are, the bigger a target you become.”
Even Valadares’ follow-up game continued the trend he started in Agar.io: engaging multiplayer gameplay with simplistic visuals. In diep.io, players level up and battle tanks in a simply designed, persistently multiplayer arena. “diep.io only took about two or three weeks to develop,” he explained.
So Agar.io started a trend, but what do those two letters actually mean? Well: “Agar is a medium in which cells are cultivated,” explained Valadares. "The ‘.io’ was just the domain I used for the web game. It was easier to get a short <name> like that.”
While the story behind the genre-defining suffix might be somewhat anticlimactic, the impact that single game has had is far from it.
“It’s been pretty amazing to see casual massively-multiplayer online games like this becoming a thing,” Valadares told us. “To have something that started from quite small beginnings become a game played by millions – and a number 1 app – is something I didn’t really see coming.”</name>