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Video Game Database Discussion / Re: Error Listings and rejected edits 2024
« on: February 25, 2024, 07:06:34 am »I heavily second this. A clear majority of (but not all!) [FR][NL] games in the database should be [BE][FR][LU][NL] to truly represent their original market. And that only covers the market for french+dutch games… IMHO striving for country completion in the title for the european market is a wild goose chase, and doomed to be misleading *at best*. In this case most if not all european games with french & dutch on the box were released in Belgium, in addition of France, Netherlands, or both.
Listing languages on the box when a game has several language variations in a given region would be much less disputable.
Attaching TLD information to entry names based on language text leads to more problems than based on country of origin.
- Consider items without any packaging text.
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- Consider items with only one regional release, regardless of the amount of languages present.
Same as today; only one entry in a region => no need to explicitely state the sale countries. Could be the same with languages.
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- Consider the English language. What sort of tag are you implying be given to it? Be aware that [EN] is not a TLD.
EN must be the language code for english in some ANSI standard as well as some ISO standard. I would be astonished if not the case.
And again, it would only appear when necessary.
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- Consider items which a language is present that doesn't directly relate to its country of origin. For instance, are you suggesting Canadian entries be tagged as [FR]? Brazilian items be tagged as [PT]? There are plenty of items originating from Asia with only English as the language text, even.
I hardly see the problem here: an NA entry with french on the box obviously was not published in France, but most definitely (at least) in Canada.
Same goes for a game with portuguese that targeted the south american market.
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- Consider items which are regional variants only based on a label, or the few which are unique based on an included component like a different instruction booklet. Hundreds of these sorts of items already exist within the database, and their packaging languages are the exact same as others.
If we’re talking of stuff like the portuguese IGAC stamp, maybe an “(with IGAC stamp)” mention would be crystal clear?
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- Consider regional variant items which rely on descriptors solely instead of TLDs, such as 245945. TLDs should only be attached when multiple entries within the same exact name in the same category exist, so a TLD isn't used in this situation. With your proposal, there would be.
Nope. My proposal is to replace the rule of “use country codes, when necessary“, with a rule of “use language codes, when necessary”.
IMHO that would change absolutely nothing for the entry you linked here.
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The thing is, we all agree there’s a problem: splitting markets into regions is not enough, as some games got several versions in a same region, with the only changes being a) the region’s countries there were sold in and b) the languages printed on the box.
*I* think the current solution is unsatisfactory because fundamentally flawed by the lack of clear information about countries a game is / were sold in, especially for old games (and perhaps more especially within the EU “single” market).
On the other hand, the thing with languages printed maybe 30 years ago on a box is that everybody that owns this box has a direct, undisputable access to the information about what languages are printed on said box. Using that instead of the country is easy, verifiable, correctable and reproducible. 4 qualities the country code lacks, if you ask me.