Simon Carless (1835) on 8/14/2017 8:05 PM · Permalink · Report

Sorry, grumpy people in these comments! I'm aware that losing mandatory descriptions still bothers some people. But we'd also like to celebrate those who have caught up on the ten of thousands games we were missing that nobody was likely to write descriptions for.

We're good with fiddling with description points but much like reviews, we seem to degenerate into lack of consensus when changing things like this.

MAT (240793) on 8/16/2017 3:30 AM · edited · Permalink · Report

The scraper works great with US PSN site, right? But do you know how many hundreds and thousands of Japanese-only PSN games and DLCs are out there that noone will add because it requires description and noone plays such games to be able to write one or wants to spend too much time researching, or is simply unable due to a language barrier. That said, there are just as many timed PSN games same as on US PSN, and because we can't use scraper to add those there's a good chance we'll never ever have them in our database and they'll just be lost in time.

EDIT: My point here is that if descriptions aren't mandatory (as they are not on English scraped games), then anyone would be able to add Japanese or other non-English games with ease and we'd have them in our DB. It wouldn't be that much different to English scraped games with ad-blurbs only since Japanese scraped games would still have promo shots and would be more or less depicted. And description could always be added. By not allowing this we can never catch up with non-English games in quantity and there are just as much as English games out there. Not sure why we'd put priority to have English-only games. This is sort of a game museum in a way, we try to record history, not English-only games and who cares about the rest.

EDIT 2: At the very least, if we do enforce description requirement for non-English game, we should allow it to be completely minimalistic for the sake of actually getting such entries in larger quantities. Something like "X is a fantasy role-playing game played in top-down perspective.". I know that info is covered in genres alone, but that would help users add such games without having to know the story or too much about the game, just looking at screenshots would suffice. Just saying. I'm not gonna add such entries, but it would help for all the others that might if acceptable.

Simon Carless (1835) on 9/10/2017 10:01 PM · Permalink · Report

I know there's no point discussing this with the 'old guard' - who did a ton of work on this back in the day - but we lost the 'fight' with Wikipedia over descriptions 10+ years ago. Theirs are generally more complete and better because lots more people contribute to their website & it's easy to do so. That was true WAY before myself and Reed even started in 2013.

So we had a couple of choices. Either just don't document new games much at all (since descriptions were mandatory), or document them without descriptions but with metadata like covers, credits, and promo images. We preferred to push the latter - especially given that we were only getting 2 or 3 people doing 'proper' quality regular descriptions for new games even BEFORE this change. And were thousands of games behind.

I'm aware that it is a perversion of the original MobyGames concept. But as proven by Google Analytics logs, what people visit us for nowadays by and large is not original descriptions on famous games. It's for stuff like credits - which we do have for Mass Effect Andromeda and almost nobody else does. (We're #1 result for 'Herbert Lowis game credits', for example, one of the lead animators.) Also covers and promo art. We do good on those. We hope to continue.