I don’t like the text either, and it’s mostly not helpful the way I have it done. I was just kind of playing with it. Some of these games it’s hard to tell what the heck the other version or bundle or whatever is called just from the box art.
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That’s true. Especially the FFXIV stuff. I feel like I have to write a tutorial for people to figure out how to join/sub to the game, especially since it has two different free trials. 
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Carousels are pretty inaccessible unless really well coded. I think it better to avoid them.
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You saying I can’t code? Them is fightin words!
I also don’t generally love them, and I definitely don’t have the front end chops to build a good one with good swipe behavior and what not.
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Lol. Carousels are just generally a pain. It feels like a waste of your time to put your top shelf skills toward a carousel.
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If a status in the “Community statuses” tab is too long, it can’t be expanded by clicking “Read more”.
For example my status here:
Hmmm. I can click read more and see it.
Maybe my browser (firefox on android) is blocking javascript, same for Firefox on desktop
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Absolutely stoked to see automated data migration for game entries happening! There is something a little bit confusing about the move feature though. For example I got this notification:
A game called “Turok: Dinosaur Hunter” was migrated to another game of the same title. Great. Clicking the link leads me to the following screen:
This is where I’m stumped. I cannot be not sure if the data was moved to the correct IGDB entry, because as far as I can tell there is no way to see what it was migrated from. In this case it’s probably fine because I played the original 1997 version, and there is just one turok game released that year on IGDB, but other cases may not be as clear cut.
What adds to the confusion is that I misunderstood what this screen does. After reading “Moving from” and “Moving to” I thought that it shows me the GB entry and let me pick an IGDB entry to move to in case the automatic migration was not correct. It’s only after I spent a good while trying to find the 1997 turok IGDB entry that I realized that the game on the left already is the new entry, and the GB one isn’t shown.
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OK, that’s great feedback that this messaging might be confusing. What’s happening in these situations is that I’m taking a Giant Bomb entry, and merging them to the corresponding IGDB entry. Most of the time, it’s pretty cut and dry, and there isn’t really any need to notify the user that all their data got moved from the GB entry to the IGDB entry because it’s a one to one match. When a GB entry gets merged to an IGDB entry, after all the data is moved, the GB entry is deleted.
In a situation like Turok here, GB had the original 1997 entry and the 2015 remaster as one entry, but you can’t really tell what the user is logging. IGDB splits them as 2 entries that point to each other. What I’ve been doing in these situations is merging the GB game to the “main daddy” entry (AKA the original), and then notifying the user that hey, we moved all your data for this game, and it might be wrong. There might be people on this Turok entry that were actually logging the remaster, so moving their data to the 1997 entry is wrong, but we made this simple move data tool, so I auto link them to that.
Hope that clears up what’s going on. I’ll try and think of a better way to make this screen a little more clear what’s going on.
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No worries, I was assuming something like this.
I just found something else where I’m not sure if it’s working as intended. I have (the) Gnorp Apologue (2023) | Grouvee in my collection. That’s ID 98881-the-gnorp-apologue, which is a gb/grouvee entry. Moving that data at first doesn’t recommend any games.
If I then search for gnorp I’m getting the following
That’s
- (the) Gnorp Apologue | Grouvee (102427-the-gnorp-apologue)
- The Gnorp Apologue (2023) | Grouvee (401332-the-gnorp-apologue)
Issue is that 102427-the-gnorp-apologue is not actually an IGDB entry. So I could in theory move all data from one gb/grouvee entry to another gb/grouvee entry.
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I should put some messaging up. The suggested games actually only show up for IGDB games. Basically I just put other versions of the game up as a suggestion. So if your data is on an IGDB entry for pac-man arcade version, the suggestions are going to be the 3 million ports in the IGDB database. I probably should do an IGDB game search as the default suggested games if you’re trying to move from a giant bomb game. Does that word salad make any sense?
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Oh, no yeah, it makes perfect sense. As far as I can tell the auto-suggestions are working absolutely fine and only suggest games from IGDB. It’s the manual search on the move screen that returns giantbomb (or grouvee only) games in its results.
I reckon that this might be an edge case that only happens if there are duplicates or entries with similar names from giantbomb available. I just tried this with the example I mentioned above where I started with 98881-the-gnorp-apologue which I had on some shelves and some playthrough data:
I then used the move function to move it to 102427-the-gnorp-apologue. Everything worked fine, and I moved all my game data from one giantbomb game to another giantbomb game:
Since this is another giantbomb/grouvee game, the game page gives me the option to move again. So if I wanted to I could move data back and forth between the two IDs.
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Yeah, like you said, you can move your data back and forth between GB games right now. I suppose that’s OK in the scheme of things. I’ll add something to at least mark that a searched for game is a GB game, and I’ll probably shove it to the bottom of the list. There might be a weird case where IGDB doesn’t actually have a game GB does, and we’ll want to keep the data around until we get it added. I’ll get some stuff worked on this weekend!
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I think I’m in the minority here as the merge has drastically decreased usability, at least for the way I utilize the site, which is simple cataloging of games I’ve played.
For instance, after being given warning of a merge of my entry, searching Prince of Persia brought up over a dozen different pages for that exact titled release alone. And now each of those individual ports and re-release pages will all have their own separate subset of reviews (or not, considering). It’s just so much clutter and scattered data for what is essentially a single game with few discernable differences between the dozen or so releases it has had. The idea it deserves so many pages is.. not one I really accept.
Simply put, it just feels like a mess.
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It’s good feedback.
I was slightly worried about the overwhelmingness of some of these entries. At the end of the day, I didn’t really have a choice since Giant Bomb doesn’t have an API for the foreseeable future.
I’m kind of waiting to see how user data gets split over some of these games (Prince of Persia, Pac-Man, Tetris, etc.). I might end up doing some kind of roll up of ports to the main pages or something. I’m also going to implement some version of filtering for search where you’re really only going to get main game results in the search. All the ports and remasters and remakes can be navigated to from the main game. That might also mitigate some of the overwhelming entries.
Hopefully you stick around and give us some more chances!
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I can definitely see the edition thing being overwhelming. IGDB might have gone a little overboard with what they consider separate games. It’s probably also a super hard problem to fix, especially downstream. Like, some kind of rollup or clustering could help, but what about edge cases where ports of games are legitimately different games, like the well beloved PS2 Spider-man 2 and its PC port which was a fundamentally different game? A while ago it was general practice for “multi-platform” games to be completely separate games that only shared the same title (and usually license).
Luckily this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore (that I’m aware) but nowadays we have a similar situation with remakes and remasters. Where should the line be drawn of where two editions of a release count as the same game?
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Fans argue to this day what edition of chrono trigger is the best one. They are all sold as the same game, but the release on each platform is different, with added cutscenes, additional dungeons, different sprites, changes to controls, etc.
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The Halo: Combat Evolved remaster only differed in visuals, to the point where players could toggle the old and new graphics with a button. Those updated visuals and assets often clashed with the original art style and players didn’t really like it.
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The Warcraft 3 remaster was marketed as visual upgrade only, and replaced the original on various storefronts. At the same time it was infamous for its changes to the original and a laundry list of bugs and technical issues.
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The Final Fantasy 7 remake which has completely changed core gameplay and considerable changes to the story.
Mind you that I’m not necessarily arguing against some form of simplification. This week I’ve literally spent some 15 minutes trying to figure out what versions of corpse party I played in the past because that’s less than obvious. At the same time I also believe that all these different entries are valid because they are differences variations on both technical and story level that may influence the enjoyment of the game. It’s a hard problem is what I’m saying.
I am still firmly convinced that that IGDB is still a vastly better data source than giantbomb, though. I made a post about the issues with giantbomb a while ago, and the issue has not gotten better, the opposite. This week alone I was able to add over two dozen games I played in the past to my collection and I’m not even through with my list. These games simply didn’t exist on giantbomb.
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All of them is the correct answer 
I actually played this game on the PS1 as my first playthrough. The load times are terrible, but it’s still an amazing game.
There’s been so many times I look at a game and say, why the hell did they separate these versions of the game? Then I look at it a little closer, and say, well, I guess IGDB is technically right that these things are different. If you’re trying to be a ridiculously complete database, it’s worth digging into the details.
I agree. It’s also kind of the only choice now. I hope Twitch/Amazon doesn’t get funky and try and cut them loose ever. They don’t charge any money for anything, and things that don’t directly make big companies money can get chopped quickly. Luckily I think they realize the dataset is pretty valuable.
Glad you seem to like the new data! We’ll keep tweaking it as we go.
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Something I just stumbled over. I have a game on my platform with the PC (Microsoft Windows) platform. Since this is a VR-only game, the recommendation from IGDB is to set the platform as SteamVR, not PC. So I updated the game on IGDB accordingly by replacing the PC release with the SteamVR one.
Once that change propagates down to grouvee, the game page on my shelf looks like this:
Note that I have the game for a platform that doesn’t exist for it. If I edit the platforms for the game I can see both entries:
Once I remove the obsolete platform and edit the platforms again, I only see the currently available ones:
I wasn’t sure if this is intended behavior, and can see that the preference might be towards consistency of user data rather than integrity of game data with upstream. But since it could potentially be a bug I wanted to flag it, especially since this behavior might also apply to other fields if the update logic is consistent.
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That’s exactly how I intended that edit dialog to work. The goal is to preserve user data during a merge. If I merged a gb entry into an IGDB one that didn’t have the same platforms, I wanted the platform data of the user to remain until they go in and move things around.
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