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What’s In A Name When It's .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’ ideas: 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
This style has become so popular that 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 the aesthetics and upgrades them with stunning graphics amd impressive effects. Its multiplayer combat continues that simple .io goal of dominating the opposition.
How does it feel to start a trend?
“It’s been pretty amazing to see casual massively-multiplayer online games like this becoming a thing,” Valadares replied. And he adds, “to have something that started from quite small beginnings become a game played by millions—and a No. 1 app—is something I didn’t really see coming.”
And about that name that started it all? “Agar is a medium in which cells are cultivated,” explained Matheus. "The .io was just the domain I used for the web game! It was easier to get a short <name> like that.”