СВОИ — choosing a domain
Product analysis · 17 August 2026 · platform scope · every figure measured today, method at the foot
Recommendation: split the decision in two. Register a cheap free .ru this week purely to get the client and the WebSocket off sudoky.net, and settle the brand before buying a brand domain — because a live Russian business already trades as «Свои Игры», and because the good short .ru names are all registered already.
1. What people actually search for
Pulled from Yandex Wordstat today via the Direct v4 API, Russia (GeoID 225), monthly, broad match.
| дурак онлайн | 474 404 |
|---|---|
| играть в дуракаnested inside the above | 224 086 |
| шашки онлайн | 176 111 |
| играть в карты онлайн | 37 355 |
| карточные игры онлайн | 31 637 |
| русские шашки | 22 040 |
Two things follow. People search the game, never a platform: «дурак онлайн» alone outweighs every generic card or category phrase combined by more than ten to one. And the modifiers dominating the tail are бесплатно and без регистрации — the visitor's fear is a paywall and a signup form.
For a platform this is the central tension. Demand arrives per game, so the traffic will land on /games/durak and /games/checkers — never on the platform name. The domain therefore earns nothing in search and everything in recall: it is what a returning player types, and what a second game inherits for free. Optimise it for memory, not for keywords.
2. The keyword lane is closed — and that no longer matters
| Domain | Status | Who holds it |
|---|---|---|
| durak.ru | live rival | «Дурак онлайн — карточная игра» |
| durakonline.ru | live rival | «Играй с живыми соперниками» |
| durakgames.ru | live rival | the sharpest competitor per the strategy doc |
| shashki.ru | taken | Russian Draughts Federation |
| svoi.ru | in use | a live Gatsby site, not parked, not for sale |
Since Durak is one game of several, a domain named after it would have been wrong even if it were free. The whole card-themed lane I first assembled — razdacha.ru, kozyr.ru, tuz.ru, svoikarty.ru — is retired on the same logic, however well it read. Exact-match domains also stopped being an SEO lever years ago, and we have in-house proof: anekdotnik grew organic traffic 5.4× without even a Webmaster registration.
3. Two measurements that should change the brief
Neither finding argues against the product. They argue that the differentiator must be the one the strategy doc already chose — provable fairness — because speed and ad-cleanliness are not ours to claim against the strongest rivals.
4. What a candidate has to survive
- The heard-once test. A Russian speaker who hears the name spoken must type it correctly in Latin, first try. This kills more candidates than availability does: «козыри» is kozyri or koziri; «карты» is karty or karti. Anything carrying ы, й or ь leaks traffic.
- It must be .ru. The audience is in Russia and the category is trust-sensitive. The portfolio is already inconsistent — sudoky runs on .net — and that is worth ending rather than extending.
- It must not name any one game. Non-negotiable now that this is a platform: the name has to still fit when the third and fourth games land.
- It must carry a WebSocket subdomain without looking odd — realtime needs ws. or duel. on the same name. Today it borrows duel.sudoky.net, which is the operational reason this is P0 at all.
5. The shortlist, platform-shaped
Lane A — free today, register for pocket money
| Domain | Reading | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| klubigr.ru | «клуб игр» — games club | Passes all four tests cleanly. Generic, and generic is survivable for an infrastructure domain. |
| tvoikon.ru | «твой кон» — your round, what's at stake | Game-agnostic, idiomatic, types cleanly. The best-sounding free option. |
| igrysvoi.ru | «игры СВОИ» | Keeps the brand and the platform scope, at the cost of inverted word order. |
| nashiigry.ru | «наши игры» | Clean, but «наши» carries the same in-group charge as «свои». |
| narodnyeigry.ru | «народные игры» — folk games | Accurate for a traditional-games platform. Long, and reads institutional. |
Lane B — registered but parked, i.e. buyable
Each resolves to an investor parking page rather than a business. A price exists; I have not asked for one and would not without your say-so.
| Domain | Reading | Note |
|---|---|---|
| nakonu.ru | «на кону» — at stake | SN Park Sharpest of the buyable set: short, game-agnostic, types perfectly, and says the games matter. |
| potekha.ru | «потеха» — amusement, as in «делу время, потехе час» | SN Park Warm and distinctly Russian; wobbles on the heard-once test (kh/h). |
| vseigry.ru | «все игры» — all the games | SN Park Literally the platform promise. Flat. |
| mirigr.ru | «мир игр» — world of games | listed for sale The only one openly on sale, so a purchase rather than a negotiation. |
6. What I would do
- This week, unblock the infrastructure. Register one free .ru — klubigr.ru or tvoikon.ru — and move the client and the WebSocket onto it. It ends the borrowing from sudoky.net, which is a real coupling between two unrelated products. A few hundred roubles, fully reversible.
- Answer the brand question before buying a brand domain. A live ИП already trades as «Свои Игры» in the games and entertainment category. That does not automatically block anything, but it should be checked against the trademark register before the name is committed to for a decade.
- If СВОИ survives that check, budget for a purchase and watch svoiigry.ru through its expiry. I checked around eighty names; the free .ru space holds nothing both short and game-agnostic. A good short name is an acquisition, not a registration.
7. Method, and what I did not check
Availability came from live WHOIS over TCP against whois.tcinet.ru (.ru) and whois.verisign-grs.com (.com), plus RDAP for the new TLDs — around eighty names. Parked-versus-live was decided by fetching each domain and reading what came back; four domains initially looked parked because of a reused temp file and were re-checked individually, and they in fact do not resolve at all. Demand came from the Yandex Direct v4 Wordstat endpoint. Page weights and TTFB are single unauthenticated fetches from a European datacentre — read them as ratios, not absolutes. Competitor discovery used a US-region web search, which under-represents the Russian SERP, so treat the rival list as indicative. I did not request a price for any parked domain, did not search the Rospatent trademark register, and did not verify the NTV registration itself.