What does .io mean?

I see a lot of games with .io. Is a particular type of game or website or something? Does it mean it's online multiplayer?

Thanks

 

Do you mean in terms of URLs?

'The Internet country code top-level domain .io is assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory. The .io domain is administered by the Internet Computer Bureau, a domain name registry company based in the United Kingdom.'

 

WHAT?! Goddamn i always though it meant "input/output" or "on/off" and had to do with tech related pages.

 

Regardless of what it's intended for you're right that that's how it's usually used. For a while I'm pretty sure it was super trendy to have your backend systems on a ".io" domain.

 

Whatever something is invented for you can be sure web developers will bastardise it in someway.

 

In case you see a pattern of 'gamename.itch.io', I would imagine this is due to itch.io, a very liberal storefront that takes no cut. When you open up a store page there, you get a subdomain of itch.

 

Basically some people made some games in that regional web location and the users thought and considered the games name to be one and the same as it. I don't know if it started that way but now game makers certainly do include the .io part as included in the name.

After the first games were really popular and also popularised the straight off the web format, now other people want to jump on the band wagon and ride on that popularity. So it went from being just a random inconsequential domain extension to now being a game term that means something else (like load straight from the web free game, etc).

It's a little bit like how every scandal now days is something "gate". I'm sure most of the people now who share it and sort of know what it (now) means have no clue that it originated from the "watergate scandal", which was actually named after the watergate hotel that it took place at. People now just think "gate" is what you add to a name to make it sound like a scandal... and so if that's how they use it, that's now what it means.

 

Spoiler: British Indian Ocean Territory is far from Mare Tranquillitatis

 

It basicly gone viral after Agar.io.

 

He has the right answer.

 

Something interesting to think about...... when the name of your game includes a domain name and country, like "slither.io", ..... and in modern web browsers, when someone types in a search term into the address bar the web browser will interpret it either as a search query or as a web address, if the thing you type is "slither.io" it will in fact go straight to that WEBSITE, rather than go to a google search result, which guaranteed 100% of the time that people typing that into the bar will go to the website and nowhere else. That is a HUGE thing because even if you get #1 placement for the term in google it may only get 30% of the clicks. It's a very interesting way to get traffic to your website or browser version of a game.

 

/\ This.

+ the fact, you can have almost any domain name, for fraction of the price, what you would get otherwise on .com, .net etc. And is high probability, is not taken, or reserved.

So is very convenient.

Also, when browser searching, it is no more critical to have .com, .net etc., as it was years back. Crawlers are likely to find anyway and position accordingly to its popularity and relevance.