Giantbomb API Feature Requests

I wanted to create this thread as the main place to request features for the staff to work on in the API. It seems that there are quite a few developers ready to make some really compelling apps, but currently some of the missing features makes that very difficult or impossible. Here are few of the ones that I would like added, and I would hope other developers could add in what they're looking for - together we can really expand the Giantbomb brand to a host of cool apps and utilities with the right support from the API's developers.   
 

Sorting:

Yeah, sorting sucks. You could get around that by mirroring everything locally and implementing your own decent searching and sorting methods, but that's hardly practical.

The thing with news is that I'm not sure it uses the same license as the wiki stuff. Contributions to the wiki are licensed as CC-BY-NC. And I get the feeling they don't even like doing that. Most gaming sites like to retain the copyright over editorial content and like to make it available under free or sorta free-ish licenses. I imagine Giant Bomb's staff would be the same way. They don't mind making an RSS feed available; many sites do that. But making it available through the API with primarily CC-BY-NC content makes it look like the news would be available under that license, even if that's not what they intended. I'd only like to see news made available through the API if they explicitly state that they've released it under the CC-BY-NC license. There's too much licensing confusion already.

I'd love a list of authors for... well, about everything that the API can retrieve. For news and video though, you can currently get that from the RSS feed, through the dc:creator element. Yeah, it doesn't give you everything you want. But I haven't seen anything happen on the API development front for a very long time, so I'm not sure you'll ever see any of these enhancements. :(

For anyone that was wondering, the 4 feeds are: 
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Giantbombvideos,  http://feeds.feedburner.com/Giantbombnews,  http://www.giantbomb.com/podcast-xml/, and  http://feeds.feedburner.com/GiantbombAll   
 
Although, unfortunately it seems that even things like news and videos - and to a certain extent "ALL" doesn't exactly match the site's content. It seems like it gets posted and so forth at different times and sorted differently.  Oh well. C'mon Giantbomb! Give us developers the tools to really wow you! 

I actually already posted this over in the Editing & Tools forum for the main giantbomb guys to implement into the site, but then I thought you API guys could do something with it...
 
I suppose it'd be easier to link back to that topic instead of typing it all out again:
http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/editing-tools/820/a-new-advanced-search-feature/391410/#2

One major missing piece is dlc - a game resource has no idea what dlc is available. Also, dlc reviews are lumped in with the game review without a way to discern which is which.

I might be missing this, I'm not sure, but as far as I can see API search results do not return the game platform. I see this as kind of critical. Any chance of adding this?

Hello, just to put my two cents in here, I'd like to also say that I'd love to see the sort be expanded upon, as well as the addition of a sort direction (ascending or descending).
 
Then to also have the console platform information in the result of a search query would be great too.  Having to run a loop and lookup game platforms for each result item is a bit clumsy.
 
Thanks and good work on the API thus far.

 For security reasons, you should really consider adding an API Key Secret which can be used to sign API requests with. As it stands there's nothing stopping a person from stealing another person's API Key by snooping their app's http requests or even just googling ( http://www.google.com/search?q=api.giantbomb.com+api_key shows a few). It's a fairly standard feature of most developer APIs, and just a Good Idea™ (at least if you're trying to restrict access to your API at all).

Agree that platform data on search would be useful, rather than having to hammer the API with checks for every result.

I would also echo the need for returning platform information in the Games resource... Including Genre, Publisher, and Developer would also be extremely helpful.

 As a UK based dev, I would love the ability to return UK box art (or any other country for that matter!) if available. Even if all images were available as URL's, with a caption, and we had to look for any with UK in the title (Halo CE for example, has a UK box art file which is not available via the API).
 
Hopefully this can be included in the proposed rewrite.
 
And I also would love the full genre, publisher and developer information within the standard search request - although I imagine there could be problems with queries where different devs have worked on different platforms etc - hanheld versions are often different devs.
 
Thanks for everything we have so far!

After using the API for awhile now, I definitely agree we need better sorting, especially for searches. Right now I recursively do a search and fetch all results so I can reliably display results (i.e. exact matches go to the top and then sorted by popularity!).
 
In addition, I'd love to see the Achievements resource exposed (I don't even know how you get that info, Xbox API?).
 
I also would like to reduce round-trips to the API so a way to manually pre-fetch relationships would be awesome. Example, I would love to show platforms on search but in order to do that, I'd have to re-fetch the platform data per each game in the search... when search already takes 100-300ms, adding that again and again... not fun. I already am forced to do it when a user adds a game (I fetch platforms and soon am going to have to fetch releases too).

I just wanted to make a list of great in game music, but noticed (I think) that GB doesnt grab specific tracks of soundtracks, which I find kinda sad since gamemusic is one of my favorite genres of music. :) So I guess Id like a dataentry for musical tracks out of the game OSTs.

Hello,

I'm posting here but what I'm looking for might already be available in the current API and I simply overlooked (because it seems like what I'm doing is a bit overcomplicated compared to my very simple goal).

Basically I want, every few days, to execute a batch that retrieves all the Xbox 360 and XBLA games, along with their genre tags and their release date.

So right now I have to do it like this (there are some extra internal things for caching and such, but this is complete as far as the API is concerned):

1. Get the list of games (/games/), filtering using "platforms" and "field_list" for id/game
2. Get game details (/game/id), filtering using "field_list" for id, name, releases and genres
3. Get release details (/release/id), filtering using "field_list" for game, platform and release_date

Could this be done in a simpler way? My main issue is really with the release date, which causes a lot of extra queries when that info could be available directly in /game/.

And if it can't be done, could it possibly be added to the API that the releases information for /game/ includes the platform, because some old games have been released on tons of platforms and in the end I have to do 20 or queries to find the right release...

Thanks

Hi,

what do you think about adding CORS header to your json responses?

I know, that you are supporting jsonp as a result format, but making plain json based requests/response handling would make life easier using javascript in modern browsers....

Thanks & cheers

Christian

My request:

Add "platforms" of the games to /search/

I realy miss that.

I'd really like to be able to get images with a specific tag (I only want screenshots, for example).

I second that. The API only allows retrieving 30 images from the gallery and I expect that these are the 30 last uploaded?

Hi,

I couldn't find these info in the game object, so I will put here as a request:

• Multiplayer - Is the game able to player multiplayer? Maximum at same time?
• Cooperative - Can I play with my friends the campaign of the game? Maximum at same time?
• Languages - Which languages the game is translated on? English, japanese, portuguese?

Now, the next request is a very special one.
I couldn't find out a place to edit games in other language.
I am Brazilian. Here we speak portuguese.
I was thinking in building a brazilian version of the giantbomb but using the same resources as you, so we could have a unique and international database game.
But for that to happen, we need to be able to edit a "portuguese" version of the game. That includes videos and any text field, like title and description.

Thanks!
Jonathan

It would be really awesome to have dlc_release and dlc_releases like we do for full games. Or add DLC to the release/releases resources? Whatever makes the most sense.

It's hard and sad to read this thread and see how it looks completely abandoned. No real answers from any mod or developer or anything.

I feel like I should still post anyway my request, even though I have no idea how much attention it would be given.

I was reading through the /api/promos/ output and it lists some of the podcasts that aren't on the bombcast rss feed. Understandably, sure. There should probably be another feed for ones that aren't "bombcasts".

However I noticed that their resource type is "podcast". That is when I saw that there is no "podcast" resource type on the API. I mean, no /api/podcasts/ or /api/podcast/id/. I don't understand why there isn't one. It looks like there should be one. So that's my request. A new API resource type that covers those podcasts.

sorry guys, we're in the midst of spinning up gamespot. We will start attacking most of these features around the end of September beginning of October. Apologies again for the lack of response, just been pretty busy.

How about allowing Instagram and Vine embedding in comments/forum posts?

@darkbeatdk: That isn't an API feature request. That sort of forum feature request would be better suited for a thread on the Bug Reporting forum.

Is there a way to expose a user's custom list via the API? If not then consider it a feature request :)

I noticed lists are displayed on the right side of the games so it is not really a privacy thing right?

@mrpibb Is there anyway that we can get the list of DLC as part of the /game resource? I've had several users on Grouvee ask me to be able to add DLC to their collection.

Hi

I would like to join the crowd here calling for the fields genres and platforms in the search results. I know I can get it from the detailed info about a game but it means I have to make a special http request for every returned search result and that makes the search sooo slow :(

Hi,

Would be nice to be able to search games by UPC/EAN

Regards,

Richard

Would you considering including genre in the releases? This would circumvent having to make an additional request to the game object.

Would it be possible to add the name of the game localized? For example:

en: Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception
fr: Uncharted 3 : L'Illusion de Drake
it: Uncharted 3: L'inganno di Drake
es: Uncharted 3: La traición de Drake
jp: アンチャーテッド 砂漠に眠るアトランティス

:D

I think something that is really useful is having the release type, if it's digital or CD.

Quick one: Access to the schedule for upcoming videos / streams? (i.e. what's in the upcoming box on the main page)

I second this request =)

Is a bug fix considered a feature request? ;-) Ref http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/api-developers-3017/missing-image-wrong-url-in-game-result-1770921/#5

I've been trying to recreate this request http://www.giantbomb.com/games/?letter=&sortBy=&platform=94&genre=&theme=&minRating=4&rating=&region=&___developers=&___publishers=&fromYear=&toYear=

using the api (basically, all PC games with an average score above 4)...but I can't figure it out, it seems the API doesn't provide average scores for games.

So on the "games" resource with have the field "number_of_user_reviews", which is good but it would also be useful to have the average score of all these reviews...unless I've missed something !

Yup. With Austin cranking out some killer articles, I'd like a better way to get to them!

Yes I would LOVE for this to be added. I currently am using the API for a bot that I have running in IRC on the #GB_Gaming_Hub channel on QuakeNet. It automatically posts site updates and stream information to the channel via /promos/ and /videos/ but the /promos/ never has news in it so there is currently no way to grab news through the API. I wonder if there is a reason it hasn't been added since the original post was almost 6 years ago at this time. I may have to reprogram the entire bot to read from the RSS instead if nothing changes. =/

Hello,

First of all, thanks for an incredible API! It's really powerful, well documented and fun to use. :)

I just wanted to ask if you would mind adding something like a number_of_characters field in the search/ response. I am making a quiz app which would use the API to create custom character quizzes. User can search for games and add them to the list. After that, characters from those games would be used to create a custom quiz. The problem is, there are games with 0 characters which should be filtered out, but that is currently impossible (without sending too many game/id requests).

I can make some sort of local black-listing solution for this, but having number_of_characters count in the search/ response would really be awesome :)

I have one request. I'm not sure how difficult it is to implement on your end, but would be nice to get the same results as shown on the main website (only using as a reference example here). What I mean, as an example if you click "New Games" on the main site versus either using /games sorted by original_release_date:desc or /releases sorted by release_date:desc the results different and neither match anything on the website accurately skimming over my results anyway.

If I am doing it wrong, can you explain?

Also, one question/inquiry, would you rather have us download the entire data and only make occasional requests to get updates or would you rather have us use the API in closer to realtime? I ask for implementation issues on my end and in some cases some APIs / ToS don't allow storing the data.

If you would rather have us store the data with only the occasional update request can you provide a download in a readable format if not, I can provide one and keep it updated and put it on GitHub or something. I've written a few. It ended up being 10's of gigabytes including the images.

I am willing to offer any services as this is the closest half way decent (but still lacking, sorry guys) video game API that I can find. I'm in Austin, but not subverting your API.

EDIT: Guys, did you change something? I'm all of sudden get redirects in the responses. I noticed it seems to result from not including a trailing slash. I never noticed this previously.

Is it possible to add support for 304 Not Modified responses? In my API calls, I'm sending an If-Modified-Since header, but I always get 200 Success responses

EDIT: While I'm asking, it seems most/all of the API endpoints work over HTTPS, but any URLs included in the response are HTTP only. Is it possible to have a HTTPS API call return HTTPS URLs where appropriate? The HTTP URLs are awkward for iOS apps, as App Store Review requires an explanation for the use of any non HTTPS URLs(and a subpar explanation can see your app fail App Review), and you have to set a global flag in the code to allow "insecure HTTP loads", which I would rather not do if I can avoid it.

Would it be possible to add a swagger definition around the the endpoints?

http://swagger.io/specification/

They offer a bunch of different tools directly from the team for Java, but they have a strong community building libraries around the swagger definition, so implementation should be fairly quick. Our implementation took less than an hour, since it was just a matter of including the package, setting up the config file, and then accessing the swagger defintion resource at our configured endpoint: mysitehere.com/swagger/ui/index.

Here's a list of open-source integrations for swagger ordered by language: http://swagger.io/open-source-integrations/

Hi!

I'd like to be able to access the data in the "important banner" during livestreams on www.giantbomb.com/chat

Example:

Access to this data would enable developers to provide community apps that can provide game information on what is being played RIGHT NOW on a livestream. Think of things like the Unofficial Giant Bomb Discord, where users might want to know (on-demand) what game is currently being played on the livestream. A Discord bot that utilizes this endpoint could provide this service. I'd appreciate it if the GB developers could add a simple endpoint to retrieve the text in that box.

Thanks!

I'm working on a site that only deals in internet-connected games, and so I'm filtering away any games that only exist on consoles that have no internet capabilities (NES, PS1, Game Boy, whatever). It'd be cool if that was a thing you could filter on when calling the /search endpoint - a list of Platform Ids, and then the response you get wouldn't include games that haven't been released on any of those platforms. Disregard, this turned out to not really be a major problem

Something that would be insanely cool, though, would be if I could get "genres" as a field when using the /search endpoint to look up games. Far as I can tell, if I want to include genre information, I have to send off an additional call to the /game endpoint for every result from the /search query. Which is not exactly ideal.

The /games endpoint doesn't return genres either - it seems the (singular) /game endpoint is the only place to get that info.

I was wondering if this new search would allow me to do something like this with the API?

http://www.giantbomb.com/api/search/?api_key=[Key here]&format=json&query=snes&resources=platfrom

or is this implemented yet...thanks

It seems to return number of results nut the results array is empty?

Thanks

Have you considered a create game API?

That way someone could import data from a data provider like oculus, steam, or itunes. Obviously there are pretty sensative moderation concerns but if done right it might help the giant bomb data be more accurate and get it updated faster.

With the release of Giant Bomb TV, a way of getting information on what video is currently playing would be super handy.