When I buy a game, here's what I'm looking at:
Genre
When I feel the desire to buy a game, I generally know what kind of experience I'm looking to have. "I feel like playing a shooter, but I want some RPG Progression elements in it, or a skill tree or something. Maybe a good story too.", "I just want some mindless action-gamey stuff. I don't want it to be too difficult, and I don't want to have to think all that hard about it. Simple and fast-paced with low skill ceiling." I search keywords as appropriate in the genre.
Gameplay
Generally speaking, I'm looking for snippets of gameplay. I'm looking to see if the advertising of the product delivers on what it actually has. I don't need a screenshot that shows an RPG battle. That tells me nothing. Generally speaking, I'm looking for the game to know what its hook is, and to show off that hook. Horizon Zero Dawn did this amazingly with its advertising. What's the story of that game? Who knows. Who cares. You play a girl with a bow and you hunt robot dinosaurs. That's the hook. All the advertising showed this girl shooting robots with a bow. This is what I'm looking for when I browse screenshots or trailers. If your game is boasting "massive skill tree", then you BETTER have a screenshot of the whole thing and how big it is.
Title
I use the title as a "general indication" of the creativity of the dev. Does the title sound generic? If so, I probably won't be interested. Does it sound insanely obtuse or nonsensical? I can wager most of the game is probably the same way. Is it straightforward and tell me what the game is or what it's about without context? I can probably assume the game will be that way too. The title conveys to me the intent of the game and the general "structure" of how it is most likely designed.
In particular, I'm a fan of titles where I don't know what the title means... until the game tells me. You may even notice that about my own game (Second Shoreline). What is Bioshock? The game never really tells you, but it hints at the meaning of it, which makes the meaning pretty evident. What is "Mass Effect"? Game tells you immediately with the opening text crawl. Etcetera. I sort of really enjoy when a title pulls this off. It has no meaning until the game gives it meaning and that meaning is significant. You don't know what it means unless you've played the game.
Reviews
Honestly, I really only tend to read bad reviews. What I'm looking for is a "dealbreaker" for me. I will put up with a lot of "badly designed" aspects of a game if that game is still fun. I'm looking for things that would just make me not want to play. Excessive grind. Forced replay. Bad controls. Nonsensical story. Systems that are counter-intuitive. Game-breaking glitches. Etcetera. Bad reviews usually give you all the negativity they have and I find it useful as a consumer. I watched a bad review of Dead Rising 4 and bought the game anyway. Yes, the game is terrible. Not too terrible that I didn't enjoy my time with it. But, not so great I'd ever play it again after beating it 3 times. The negatives didn't outweigh the positives. This is why I read bad reviews pretty much exclusively. That, and I don't need to read, "the game was great! 10/10!". These are often not very truthful reviews, and few people understand what giving a perfect score even means.
Price Point
What is the game giving me in terms of what I'm paying? I don't care how good "The Last of Us" is or was... I'm not paying more than $25 for it. To me, it's not worth much more than that. I don't care how amazing Paper Mario: Origami King is... I can't fathom paying more than $30 for such a title. Persona 5? Yeah, I'd pay $60 for that. Witcher 3? Yeah, $60 game. Your price point is a promise of how much fun I should be having with your game. $60 means that I'll enjoy most of my time with your game and that I'll probably want to play it again. $30 is "I'll play it once, be bored for like 25% or more of it, and never touch it again when I'm done." I will pay what I believe your game is worth. If it's good for a single run, I don't want to pay more than $30 or $35 for it. If it's a "shovelware" type title, I don't expect to pay more than $20 for a couple hours of goofiness. If it's a massive sprawling game that I'll get lost in and spend my work day thinking about... $60 or more. There are a few games I'd pay more than $60 for. Especially to obtain their DLC. But, I ain't paying $60 for a RPG Maker title, even if it boasts 100 hours of gameplay. Most of that is because I interact with people on the forums (and thus have a decent grasp of the typical caliber of devs using the engine) and have spent time designing with the engine to know what it is and is not capable of doing (with and without plugins).
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Anyway, that's what I'm looking for when I buy a game. Title is like... third down the list. I don't even use it all that much to determine if I'm buying the game. It's more a measure on what the game design is probably going to be like. If all a dev can think of for a title is something generic... then the gameplay is probably pretty likely to be generic as well. If the game dev thinks of something incredibly obtuse with a lot of large words in it... you can bet the game is probably going to just as obtuse and difficult to penetrate (usually, these are titles where the dev thinks video games are art. As a general rule, I don't associate with anyone who thinks "having fun" is "art". These people are trying to elevate something to higher standards that it shouldn't ever strive to be, because it loses all meaning when it does... and they're typically doing it so they can justify their own job choices or their own hobby choices, which means... insecure people. I don't play "artsy" games. Games exist to provide me with fun. Nothing more, nothing less. I don't play games to tackle moral quandries. I don't play games to think heavily about philosophy. I play games for fun. As do most people. Games can HAVE ART in them, but games are NOT ART. I refuse to play games made by anyone who thinks games are art, because their games are usually terribly subpar as a result of this mindset). The title often conveys exactly the mindset of the devs as they designed it and the mindset of anything in the game that exists. If the title is obtuse, you can bet most of the gameplay or story is obtuse as well. If the title is generic, same story.
The title of your work tells me, the game player, who you are as a dev and what your likely design philosophies are. It is "judging a book by its cover", but we all do that. Otherwise, we'd be roped into watching every movie, reading every book, playing every single game, interacting with every single person... even when we know we probably won't like the vast majority of them.
) There's not really a formula to craft the perfect title. Maybe start with the manga-style title as your working title and whittle it down from there to find the heart of it.
