It’s taken three months, going back to the drawing board at least once, collectively days of brainstorming, and several rounds of voting to narrow down from the 50+ suggestions that people in the organisation came up with but we’re finally ready to reveal the new name for our studio.
There is nothing wrong with your neural link. Do not attempt to adjust your interface. We are now controlling the transmission.
We are Null Signal Games.
Why “Null Signal Games”?
We went into this rebrand with four criteria for a new name:
- Nothing relating to a specific culture
- Nothing specifically from Netrunner
- Easy to spell
- Easy to pronounce
Everyone in the organisation was given an opportunity to submit names for consideration, and we winnowed them down through several rounds of voting, as well as feasibility discussions to make sure we considered the top candidates from a variety of different angles.
Null Signal has a nice cyberpunk feel to it, and it’s a subtle reference to the (very) brief period after the FFG Netrunner satellites stopped broadcasting before we hijacked the signal and started broadcasting our own version. If you squint, you might also see a nod there to one of the seminal works of cyberpunk literature.
We also wanted something that indicated what we do, and the suffix “Games” was the option preferred by the majority of the organisation.
So what next?
As we announced in our original article about the rebrand, this does not change the name of the game. Netrunner is still Netrunner. Null Signal Games is the new name for our organization, and we’ll be handling the transition as follows.
The new domain, nullsignal.games, is already up and running. You might even have clicked a link to that URL to read this article! The old domain still has a lot of time before it expires, so all the old links will continue to work and will be redirected here for some time yet.
Our social media pages will be changing too. Many platforms will allow us to change our name seamlessly; for others, we’ve had to register a new account. We’ve included a list below of our new social media accounts so you can check if you’re following us.
For emails, much like the website, the old ones will still continue to function until the domain expires. However, any time you see a @nisei.net email address, you can just switch that to @nullsignal.games, as the first part won’t be changing. A full list of all our department addresses are on our newly revamped About page.
For AlwaysBeRunning and Eventbrite, we’ve made the choice not to change the name on there until after the World Championships, so as to prevent any confusion during the lead up to the big event. We have the relevant new accounts up and ready to go, and will switch over afterward.
For MakePlayingCards and DriveThruCards, the shop name will change any time now and we’ll make sure all our links are updated as soon as the transition kicks in. It won’t impact any orders already placed, but if you find a dead link to order from, please just let us know.
For Redbubble, unfortunately we’ll have to set up a whole new page because they won’t let us change the shop name so for merchandise like stickers, hats, tees, and clocks, we’ll be working on that shortly.
As you might expect, this is a large undertaking, so if you see remnants of our old name in the next week or so, don’t fret—we’re hunting them down!
If you have any questions about the change, check out the Questions section of our previous announcement article, or send us a note at info@nullsignal.games.
Thanks for your patience with this process. We’re excited to share our new identity with you!
