What does “.io” mean that is attached to the end of some video games titles and website titles?
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In theory it means “British Indian Ocean Territory” in practice it is just another generic top level domain targeted at coders and programmers who think using it as a abbreviation for Input/Output is cool. Games hosted on a server with that domain ended up incorporating that part into the name of the game.
To expand on that:
On the internet you have two different type of domain endings: things like “.com”, “.org”, “.net” etc and country specific ones like “.fr”, “.de”, “.uk” etc.
When the second type was created they gave out country specific ones for every place that was at least sort of a country. This included a bunch of territories that were actually part of another country like “.vi” for the US Virgin Islands.
Some countries and territories ended up with cool sounding domain endings like Tuvalu got “.tv”. They decided to make some money of that and instead of just using it for people and organizations in the country they decided to let everyone register one who wanted a a domain ending in “.tv” for money. (The earnings from renting out their internet name actually make up a not competently insignificant fraction of their gdp.)
The British Indian Ocean Territory got “.io”. Due to ethnic cleansing and other various crimes against humanity these islands don’t have any actual permanent population anymore and are just used by US and UK military personal and contractors.
So there was no need for a “.io” domain ending to be used by anyone who lived there.
Arguably one could say that the domain belongs to the people who used to live on those islands and were forcibly expelled from their homes, but the same could be said about the islands themselves.
In any case the control of “.io” ended up with some rich guy who marketed it and protected the money himself.
It was used by a bunch of coding projects and organization who thought the I/O thing fit with what they wanted to do with their domain.
A few years back one of those projects created a very successful web based game called “Agar.io”.
This spawned a bunch of other games who wanted to imitated the success of that one who also used “.io” domains for their websites.
The “.io” often became part of the name of the game even when it was not distributed over a domain at all but downloaded from an app-store. It had become part of the brand of these types of games.
It is a nice cute quirk if you ignore the plight of the Chagossians who were driven out of their homes and are not seeing any profits from renting out the name of their stolen lands like this.
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