Platform definitions on Giant Bomb make NO SENSE

Yesterday I added the platform "Nintendo 3DS" to a bunch of digital-only 3DS games on the wiki, which is correct because these are games that are on 3DS, but those changes it seems were immediately reverted since when I checked today this edit is gone for all of those games and they are again listed only as "Nintendo 3DS eShop". First of all, it's rude to remove someone's work without warning. Second, this is nonsense because the 3DS eShop is not by any reasonable definition a separate platform. It's a shop on the 3DS. The platform is 3DS.

This brings me to the larger issue: Different digital stores or hardware editions are not new platforms, and even if you were to consider them all as such Giant Bomb is completely inconsistent on this point. There is no reason there should be a separate platform for Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo 3DS eShop and even New Nintendo 3DS, when there is only ONE single platform for PC. Where is the Steam platform?! Where is GOG? What about Epic? Origin? Battlenet? itchio? Nothing.

Yet 3DS apparently needs three separate 'platforms' for one handheld? See also PS3/PSN. What is this weird console bias? If you're going to be overly broad on what constitutes a 'platform' you have to apply that across the board.

You should either simplify console and handheld labeling or extend the range of labels for PC to be equally broad.

I don't disagree with you, but as for why it is the way it is it's an artifact of the time the website was created. It was during the early 360/PS3/Wii era when XBLA, PSN, and Wiiware were really considered separate platforms. At that point few retail games were available for download and the downloadable vs disc based games were viewed as distinct libraries. Of course by the time the 3DS came around this was much less true (at that point I think almost all PS3 games were available to download) and at this point there's no real distinction, but it kind of made sense at the time.

And of course once you've made that decision you have to be consistent with it for it to make sense so you have the definitions you have now. Should the platforms be collapsed? Probably. Now the XBLA/Xbox 360 distinction makes little sense and or something like 3DS where all retail games are downloadable it makes less, but I don't think the Wiki is a high enough priority for anyone to do the work of retrofitting all that stuff.

I understand for download only games. If a game is 3DS, I would expect that I could find a copy on ebay. If there was no physical version, having it be "3DS eshop" makes perfect sense to me. It's now lost to the void. Additionally, there are games that only worked on the NEW 3DS, so that distinction seems valid to me as well.

I do wish Steam, GOG, etc. were available options, especially because we now have the Steam Deck. There have been PC games that sounded neat, but they aren't even on Steam Deck let alone Deck playable (without modding).

I remember writing in to the Nintendownload X-Press asking for an opinion on whether Nintendo would ever allow their full retail games to be downloaded on handheld consoles. It was read on the Giant Bombcast when Jeff hosted an episode and I think everyone basically laughed off the idea.

As for "it's rude to remove someone's work without warning", that's how wikis work.

@bigsocrates That makes sense historically and it's a shame there aren't more resources available to support the wiki now, but that being the case I don't see why these virtual platform distinctions should be strictly enforced, since they're completely inaccurate anyway. Like sure, label a release as being specific to XBLA or PSN or eShop or whatever, but there is no reason to prevent the game from ALSO being labelled as being on Xbox or PS3/PS4 or 3DS respectively, since those are the actual platforms these games are on.

It especially becomes a problem when external sites use Giant Bomb's database as a foundation for doing other things, like Darkadia, a free game collection catalog service. The result is I can't add a bunch of my digital 3DS games to my 3DS collection because Giant Bomb says they're not on 3DS though they clearly are... which is why I was making those edits.

Again, if PC is ONE platform, there is no reason 3DS should be three separate 'platforms'.

Honestly, there are some valid points raised in this thread about what should and should not constitute a release or platform. However, that would necessitate a deeper conversation about some incredibly built-in and baked design choices on the wiki that we are not in a position to change or modify until further notice.

I'm sorry you found the need for the moderation team to maintain current protocol "rude," but that is in line with any community-led wiki or database. The team that keeps this system running is simply doing their best to maintain Wiki Rules, which all users are expected to follow when editing and modifying content on the site. And how other third-parties go about implementing the Giant Bomb wiki is simply not something we can control outside of abuse or API TOS violations.

@ninjadodo:

When the wiki was designed 15 years ago, it made more sense to differentiate between retail and digital. Back then, there wasn't much overlap. It makes less sense now obviously, which is why there's no digital platform pages for platforms from the Wii U forward.

There is no easy way to retroactively change all the previous ones. It would take many hours to manually "fix" it from by a regular editor and there's currently no one working on making any changes to the wiki's design from a developer level. So, we live with what we have currently.

New Nintendo 3DS is a separate platform because there are games that ONLY run on that platform.

As for it being "rude" of me to revert your edits, I'm a moderator for the wiki. Have been for 13 years. It's literally in the job description to fix people's fuck ups.

tl;dr - Yes, it's inconsistent. There's no quick way or plans to fix it. Please follow the guidelines we have in place.

If having a regular editor spend many hours manually changing properties was an actual option, I'd be happy to spend my time on it. It's basically what I do for my day job anyway and I love it (I think I even used wiki editing as an example of experience during interviews to first get into this kind of job). But I doubt that's a change that would be accepted, even if it was reasonably doable.

@eccentrix: I appreciate it, but I'd never ask anyone to do that at this point. For 3DS alone, it's over 1000 games. And you can't add games directly to the platform page itself, so you'd have to manually go through all 1000+ game pages, remove 3DS eShop, add 3DS, and update all the Release data info.

Not to mention the fact that this would royally fuck up stuff like existing user reviews, which are tied to release data.

@eccentrix: Out of morbid curiosity, I checked:

• 1000 3DS eShop games
• 1700 Vita games
• 1200 PSP games
• 2400 PS3 games
• 400 DSi games
• 1000 Wii games
• 2300 XBLA games

That's literally 10,000 games that would need to be changed. If it took someone just 3 minutes to change all the data for each one, that 500 hours of work.

Isn't this what scripting is for? How are there not tools to do batch processing for things like this?! By the way the most unobtrusive change would be to simply only add the 3DS platform (as I did) rather than remove or replace 3DSE and PSN, XBLA, etc so that existing links remain intact.

I'm gonna leave it alone since I have no interest in spending more energy on this but there was no "fuck up" since my edit was factually correct and I look forward to this mistake being corrected at some point in the future... or not. Do what you want.

@marino: 3 minutes each sounds like a high estimate, but maybe the system is slower than I remember. What if we're just adding the console to each game? I just went to take a look, that seems like it would be maybe 5-10 seconds each, depending on load times and stuff. The storefront tags are probably still useful, anyway.

I'm used to dealing with thousands of items for this type of data entry, so let's just say I'm confident I'd be comfortable with the work, if it's desirable to anyone.

@eccentrix: Changing the listed platform on the game page is relatively quick, but there's also changing the Release data. And if there are user reviews, a staff member needs to change those.

@ninjadodo: I apologize, because I do not know how to say this without coming across as rude. System choices made 15 years ago tend to be very inflexible. I have worked with converting many old systems to new systems, because it is easier to go through that massive, time intensive process that trying to modify the old system. So, just about anything that you think might be easy or sound like they should be easy (because on a more modern system it would be), you basically have to assume are practically impossible.

Precisely. I'm listening to 2008 Bombcasts right now while I work on things. They actually talked about this type of stuff on the podcasts in that era. At the time they were building the site in early 2008, Xbox's digital store required that games could only be up to a bit under 100 megabytes in size and it was a newsworthy thing when Microsoft upped the maximum size to around 250 megabytes. They didn't start selling larger games on their online store until around 2009 or so, and even then they were typically a few select original Xbox games. Major new releases were still almost exclusively physical only for a couple more years after that. For the first several years of the Xbox 360, there was almost no overlap at all between digital and physical game releases.

It was similar for Nintendo when they added the WiiWare, which was added to the Wii Shop in early 2008 and sold mostly a set of games separate from the typical physical releases.

Had the wiki been made even a year or two later, the distinction between digital and physical probably would not have happened, but at that specific period of time, their reasoning for separating out the two made perfect sense because all the console makers themselves were treating the digital storefronts as separate platforms.

@ginormous76: No need to apologize. That's a very reasonable explanation and I'm very aware that some things that seem simple or like they should be simple very much are not, especially with legacy systems that were built with different goals and requirements. I understand why it's not an easy change, but I disagree with the reasoning given above for not allowing some degree of flexibility in working around those limitations. Also though, like I said, I'm not going to push back on that any further as that does not seem like a good use of anyone's time here.

Something similar happened to me recently.

Most older Halo Games are available as part of the Master Chief Collection for PC. Their GB wiki description text even mentions this.

I‘m also tracking my games on Darkadia (which uses the GB API) - and as purchased them for PC the Halo games are now “uncategorized“ there for me. To fix this I added PC on GB as a platform, but that change was undone by @marino. Now I feel bad as I only did this with best intentions. And have some nasty uncategorized Halo entries in my Darkadia library.

Yes, I can add the entire Master Chief Collection instead… but it‘s bad for play tracking and rating. Hmph. Frustrating.

The platform rules seem to make sense from a collector‘s point of view. But not from the view of someone who wants to look up if a game is playable on any of his available devices.

If it's part of a compilation, it doesn't count. The game has to be stand alone product for that specific platform. Otherwise, for example, we'd have stuff like all the games in all the Namco Museum collections listed as releases on virtually every platform ever made in the last 30 years. It'd be a complete mess.

Are there ways to play Pac-Man on a PS2? Yeah. Is Pac-Man a PS2 game? No.

@marino: I think Pac-Man is an odd choice because its platform page is kind of messed up. Like it lists the Switch but not the PS4 even though I think the Switch version is the Arcade Archives version, which is also on PS4. And it lists the Nuon, even though I believe that's actually a fan port.

I'd maybe try to clean it up but I can't even get a game entry for Merge & Blade approved, and that's on Game Pass so I feel like it's notable enough. Not that I'm really complaining because I know that wiki resources are stretched thin and it's kind of a miracle it's still maintained as well as it is.

@marino, @bigsocrates

Well, I think the question should be: “What information does a user want to draw from the platform info?”

Btw… if we look at the wikipedia article for Pac Man:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man