Got a project near completion? Got a project with lots of screens and media? This is the place. This is for nearly finished and Projects with lots of media.
hallsofvallhalla wrote:oh that is very very nice. Great idea and excellent execution. Remember my 10% when you make a few million on this
Thank you, and everyone else who commented!
Will have a beta up quite soon. And will soon need alot help filling the database with games too :p
I would think that maybe you could crawl an existing game database to at least make a skeleton with publishers, publish dates, game names, etc. GameFAQs.com follows a pretty consistent formula and has data for basically every game ever made (even if they don't have an FAQ for it). Maybe something could be done that could get data from there. Then people could help to get up screenshots, box art, etc. Maybe even users could submit images for games that do not have any.
Missed that page, thank you! Altho a competitor, not good :p
kyraneth wrote:This is awesome! the execution is going to make browsing through this site an entertaining experience
Thank you, that is what I am aiming for!
Agent wrote:Great idea Falk! - looks like you finally thought of a good one (remember our old plans? haha)
Haha ye. Had this idea for a while, even had a half working page before (which got lost when reformating some time ago :p )
Noctrine wrote:crawling may get him sued. Like how news sites are trying to get google for directly linking to articles.
Ye that is true, never thought of that. Will watch out for that. Anyone else knows more about this issue? Altho in Sweden you can copy information legally in some extent. The work has to have some artistic value, so crawling just the name, release date, and developers would probably not be illegal in Sweden as that could be found anywhere. But copying the description might be as that is someone's work.
But are you swedish? Is your host swedish? Remember gamefaqs isn't an indie project anymore. CJayC sold out to the big guys. And copying shouldn't be to difficult, just spider the site and look in the div tags.
Hmm, as others suggested, I did not think that crawling/spidering (is there any difference? Not sure) for publicly available info, such as game names, publisher and release date was illegal. Is just gathering info using software like that illegal? I thought it would be considered a legal use of the website. I also agree that game descriptions should be left out. Those are personal works, and they are also highly identifiable as gamefaqs'. Maybe you could also add in some filters to purge, for example, games that are over 24 years old, as those are likely old arcade games that will not get that much traffic. You could easily manually add the ones that mattered, like Dragon's Lair, Donkey Kong, etc. There aren't many important ones before 1984. You could also remove games that never had a North American or European release. This would further differentiate your database from GameFAQs by removing the crap no one will ever look at.
Without some way to dump in a complete list of games, it would be almost impossible to ever have more than a fraction. I mean, who remembers every NES game? There were over 1000!
There is a big catch-22 with that approach. If there are no games in the game database website, what would attract users to stay and become interested in it. If they aren't interested in it, why would they care enough to add anything to it? There really needs to be a decent amount of data from the start, or else other sites, such as gamefaqs.com or IMDB, would work much better.
Also, one of the points of sites like IMDB is to be exhaustive. It would take thousands of editing users years to add in every game available, and until the database has at least close to every game, there would not be much point in its existence.
Noctrine wrote:IMDB has a massive team of editors that add stuff. He could do the same and not pay :p
Having volunteer staff work for you can always be a bit dicey after the AOL Community Leader Program incident. The investigation came back inconclusive, which struck many as quite odd, but it was enough of a scare to change the way online volunteer work has been handled since then.
And again, the amount of time it would take for a team to manually enter data for even a fraction of all games would take far too long. There are over 100,000 games listed on gamefaqs. The team would have to use an existing database to come close to having a complete list, even if they could enter all of them, and at that point, you would be better off getting the data through bots.
Noctrine wrote:Apparently not. Pirate bay has to shut down lol.
But are you swedish? Is your host swedish? Remember gamefaqs isn't an indie project anymore. CJayC sold out to the big guys. And copying shouldn't be to difficult, just spider the site and look in the div tags.
Pirate bay got bought by another company that saw an oppurtunity to make it legal. (sold for about $6 million).
Yes I am swedish and will use a swedish webhost
Jackolantern wrote:Without some way to dump in a complete list of games, it would be almost impossible to ever have more than a fraction. I mean, who remembers every NES game? There were over 1000!
(remember our old plans? haha)
