The name under the title wasn't ours

Micro Doc installs from the Microsoft Store. The listing has been live since 15 September, through on the first submission, free and with nothing to buy inside: zero add-ons, nothing gated behind a payment.

From today the link sits on the game page, next to the itch.io one.

Then you look at the top of the listing, and the first line under the title says Micro\_Games.

Four names for one studio

We have never written that underscore. The count of names this studio exists under, though, was already high before the Store added another one:

• microgames — all lowercase, on the site and in the domain;
• MicroGames — the display name on itch.io;
• videogiochitop — the account that publishes on itch.io, a name chosen years before the studio;
• Micro_Games — on the Microsoft Store.

The fourth isn't a typo in a description, fixed in thirty seconds. It's the publisher name, and it lives at account level: it doesn't belong to Micro Doc, it belongs to everything we will ever publish from there. It appears identically on Maze Lume's listing, and it will appear on every game that comes after.

It's also the first thing read by people who don't know us. Someone who finds Micro Doc by searching the Store doesn't have the site in front of them, or itch.io, or this devlog: they have the game's title and, right below it, who made it. If what's written there exists nowhere else, that person will search for Micro_Games and find nothing.

A name typed once into a form

Nobody decided to be called Micro_Games. It's the name that ended up in a field while registering the account, when the important thing seemed to be something else — getting to the end of the procedure — and that field didn't look like a permanent choice.

This is the same shape of fault as other things that have already happened here: a value set once, at a moment when it mattered little, which then never passes under anyone's eyes again. The zip that didn't contain the game came from a preset written the first time and never read again. The publisher name comes from a field filled in once and never reopened.

The difference is that the preset was only seen by us. The publisher name is seen by everyone, and they see it before anything else of ours.

It has to be changed from the account settings, not from the game's listing: that's where it lives.

What the Store decides, and we didn't look at

While checking the name, other answers given without much thought came out:

• the listing is in 240 markets. Games not yet submitted show 242 in the dashboard. Two are missing, and we don't yet know which: nobody picked them, they are the result of a step in the form.
• the game is offered to a single device family, Windows 10/11 Desktop, in x64 only.
• the age rating is a PEGI 3, produced by a questionnaire, not by anyone who has seen the game.

The Italian description, at least, is there and is ours: “Shrunk down and injected into the human body, you have one mission: stop the infection”. That part was written by looking at the thing.

What we take away

• A name typed once into a form becomes the studio's name for everyone who finds us from there.
• Account-level settings are the most dangerous ones to get wrong: you don't notice them on the listing you're looking at, you notice them on all of them at once.
• If a value isn't the same in every place we exist, the wrong one is in the place none of us ever opens.
• “We don't know yet” is an acceptable answer for two missing markets. It isn't one for the name on the cover.