From Klappenspiel to pipfold — and what the name cost four weeks later
· brand · shipping
The game was called Klappenspiel for three days. That is a good German name for a thing that is called that in German — and an impossible name for everywhere else. Shut the Box stands in English pubs, in French fishing villages and on Italian kitchen tables. “Klappenspiel” means nothing there.
The new name
pip is the English word for the dot on a die. fold is the tipping of the flap — and a fold is also a pen, the place where something is kept. A box in which the pips are kept.
Checked with platform/mana/scripts/namen/pruefe.mjs across all three stages:
.com free, App Store DE and US free, web search empty. .app and .ch free
as well.
“Web search empty” is the figure that matters here — and it cuts both ways. More on that below.
The package ID was changed, even though it was expensive
how.mana.klappenspiel → how.mana.pipfold. That was a deliberate decision
against the convenient route. For F-Droid this makes it a separate app:
whoever installed Klappenspiel gets no update, they get nothing. The old entry
stays in the repository and points to its successor in the description.
The alternative would have been to keep the old ID and change only the display name. Users would then have received an update to an app that is suddenly called something else — and an identifier preserving a three-day-old decision would have sat in the system for years. The signing key stays the same; the certificate fingerprint is unchanged.
Nearly lost: the save files
Godot derives the path for user data from config/name. Renaming the app
renames the folder holding statistics, settings and the round in progress. And
in this case the file names carried the old name too.
Both change in the same second. Without a countermeasure the app starts in an empty folder after the update and cheerfully reports “0 rounds played”.
_migriere_userdaten now takes over from two old folders (Klappenspiel
and klappenspiel — Godot was not consistent about that) and maps the old file
names onto the new ones, including within the same folder. Verified against
real data: 13 rounds and a best round of 8 were unchanged after the first
start.
A check keeps the migration table complete — so that a fourth save file does not silently get left behind later.
A side finding that would never have surfaced without the rename:
tools/schuesse.sh backed up the save files before every render run into a
folder that did not exist — app_userdata/klappenspiel instead of
Klappenspiel. The backup had been running into nothing since day one and
never complained. mkdir -p on a wrong path obligingly creates a wrong folder.
And then, four weeks later
On 23 August the search demand for the site was measured for the first time.
The result for pipfold.com over 88 days:
0 impressions · 0 clicks · 0 days with dataWith eight out of eight pages indexed. Google knew the site but showed it to nobody, because nobody was searching for anything it stood for.
“Web search empty” is exactly the property you want when checking a name: nobody occupies the term, the brand is yours alone. Read from the other side, the same property says: there is no demand. An invented word has zero search volume — that is not a side effect of the decision, it is its flip side, and it is unavoidable.
So the mistake was not the name but what the site did with it. It put it first.
The <title> read “Pipfold — Shut the Box, als Holzkasten”, the H1 “Nine
flaps, two dice.” — and “Shut the Box” appeared in the visible text not
once.
The correction is not to regret the name. It is to move it back: the searched term belongs at the start of the line, the brand at the end. What that meant in detail is in the entry from 23 August.
A good brand name and a good search term are two different things, and you need both — in different places on the same page.