This is a bit of a niche snippet of feedback, but… I think the previous name was more original. Everyone riding on the shoulders of giants, slapping “Meta” in front of the subject (for example “MetaThis” or “MetaThat”) feels a bit… cringey? Unoriginal? It’s a common thing we see all the time, but it’s personally a red flag that brings thoughts of “oh boy, someone struggled with a good name, so they used a name generator or used a trending term”.
While “UnrealDrive” might not have been the most descriptive, it was at least yours and original. Jumping on the Epic naming scheme of MetaHuman, MetaSounds, and so on… well when I see a product doing this, it makes me think the creator/developer was too lazy, might be trying to cash in on the popularity of another product, may be trying to trick others into thinking it’s something official, and many other subconscious elements that you learn in advanced guerilla marketing labs. In short, it’s typically not ethical at the end of the string someone might tug on.
This sort of “oopsie” can subtly distract from what might otherwise be an awesome product/project/game/whatever… People that only observe/think at a surface/shallow level tend to laugh at this sort of logic, or even grow angry and defensive at what should be an objective and transparent topic. Naming things really close to another thing? Who cares, right? Well in graphic design, we’ll take logo design specifically, what would happen if you took the Nike swoosh and flipped it upside down, and presented that? When called out about this, it’s pretty hard to act naive or deny the lack of originality, and any third-parties aren’t as quick to defend this - and it’s because it is so surface level/shallow and easy for anyone to see plain as day.
Naming/titling isn’t always so simple, and naming something can prove to pretty darned difficult at times. In the case of “MetaRoad”, though, to me personally this is pretty shallow and easy to spot. In fact, it jumped right out at me because I saw the name as I was browsing Fab, immediately had a rapid thought process of “Wait, did I miss some new Epic thing?!”, then saw your name, and was frustrated. Bam, that short event was quick, but a lot happened. Brand disorientation, excitement quickly followed by disappointment, and then specific to me (domain experience), frustration by yet another guerilla marketing tactic - intentional or not.
As I said: this is just a niche nugget of feedback. I doubt you care, I doubt most surface-level eyes/brains care, etc. But for those that scratch beneath the surface, it might be valuable feedback for you to know this is the potential thought processes and such that can go down. This is the sort of stuff that people get paid to understand and fix. This is why rebranding happens. Marketing campaigns, disassociation endeavors (trying to remove a negative association due to bad press, for example), and on and on and on.
Like let me cut deep and roleplay a bit: “MetaRoad might be pretty slick, but now that I’ve associated it with deceit, laziness, lack of creativity, etc, my assumption is I’d be wasting my time and once I saw the codebase, knowing the foundation of the easy parts like the name are rooted in those sneaky things, I doubt I’d see anything novel and awesome - probably just more laziness and lack of creativity… bad patterns, bad semantics, copy/paste from other codebases, AI slop…”
That almost hurt to write, but thought an example of what I’ve actually seen in the wild - how a lot of people actually operate when they have purchasing power and can be picky and brutally honest - that might just help bring the point home.
This is lengthy bit of feedback, but figured a thorough little dive into it would be better than a lazy “Meh, you just copied MetaThis and MetaThat like 500 others on Fab” would be more helpful to ya! I think MetaRoad looks pretty awesome and it’s on a list of assets to explore from my library, and hopefully others take the time to look past the name thing, or are the type that doesn’t tug at those strings 