Universal Videogame List - www.uvlist.net

We're listing parent and subsidiary companies in the description field as well?

Edit: Function should have at least publisher and developer.. producer might be good also, as well as distributor, but we're not listing distributors anywhere else so I'm not so sure of that. Producers are usually parent companies funding their subsidiaries, so it isn't really that useful unless there are cases this isn't true.

Fixed some quirks. Now works fine, it is available on company pages.
Distributors are country-based so I would skip them, for now.


Perhaps we should setup something like the games relations, only for companies...

The log entries for company edits are rather non-descript

Edit: "53 games were considered (85.4%)" < - what's that percentage, BTW? In the company page.

re: Company editing

Make it accept a range, like 1992-2003 or add separate field for the closing/name change/whatever date.

Edit: You've also left some debug stuff in in the company editor. Shows up if I use show preview.

Added some more fields:

- Founded in
- Closed in (closed is not really precise, should mean the latest "event" related to the company) Empty if still active
- Function

The country list is a bit short, but I wouldn't like to have a list of any country in the world, even the ones that never released games...

This is for editing companies, I'll add the option to add new ones later... With better logs.

Now we can add new companies too.
In cases (seems quite frequent) where the same company changes its name (but nothing else) please don't add multiple entries.
We'll sort this with a forthcoming feature.

Please do not add "daughter" companies for now too (Ubisoft / Ubisoft montreal), I'm going to set up companies hierarchy but haven't chose the data structure yet.

Last one, before adding a new company, please use the "global search" wisely :-)

-edit-
Just noted that we have a lot of cases of misspelled names (Ubisoft / Ubi Soft)
Despite we could start editing those games one by one, when the relation company/game will be redone, I will be able to build a "batch tool" to fix these issues at once.
So I suggest to not take too much efforts to fix companies data for now, until all the tools are ready.
On the other side, adding the missing companies is welcome.

I updated Ubisoft games to match the name correctly according to the time of their name change. The transition time requires a bit more research though.

Edit: Details in the companies thread.

I added developer "Etranges Libellules", but that's strange now... The company still don't appear in the company list, can be found when looking for "etranges" or "etranges libellules", but it can't be found when looking for "libellules".

The company searches have long seemed like they only look at few initial characters of the company name you're searching for, so based on that, of course it doesn't work.

It'd be nice that after creating a new company it would go to that company's page rather than the generic companies root.

Austria is needed for JoWooD Productions

re: re:


So it wasn't a real typo, they changed form Ubi soft to Ubisoft...
So we have to keep those two styles. Ok.

I see that we need synonyms for company names, perhaps using the usual round parenthesis like with characters and games.

re: re: re:

Or not, usually the different names are for different departments (usually studios). Synonyms will handle this until their real purpose is figured out, though.

Some publishers have different names for each region they handle, for example (region specific offices or whatever).

I'd also be interested what to do with release names that aren't company names but brands, e.g. the numerous EA brands like EA Sports (which we oddly enough have as a company, even though it isn't such). It wouldn't really be wrong to deny their use in the records here, though, but they help recognize some types of games or regions where they were released, depending on the company and their naming policies.

Russia is also needed in the country list.

Modified to "games with valid date were considered".
Translations needed :-)

Done.

Done.

The last game associated with the company could be used to script a date for this. Is there a need, as UVL is a videogame database, to track events of a company after it no longer is involved with videogames?

This is the reason the is the status "no games anymore".
If a company stops working in the gaming industry, should not be considered anymore. The description will underline this.

re: re:

This is already seen in the by year release stats, so I don't think there's need to duplicate that here even if scripted. The actual closing date is more useful and would retain some historical accuracy at least, especially when combined with the reason (name change, left game industry, etc.).

wikipedia.org has an article that seems a good starting point to track company names, foundings, mergers, closings and such.

But wikipedia tracks only those that are "notable" enough for it. So those that aren't are crudely left out. Ergo, we shouldn't leave it for them to do.

Czech is needed for Illusion Softworks.

Edit: Norway is needed for Funcom.

I would appreciate if something was made to ease replacing hundreds of wrongly named companies to their correct one. Currently I'm only aware of US Gold (should be U.S. Gold), I already changed the company page to reflect this but the ~450 published games are a bit much to change manually.

Edit: All instances of Eidos should be changed to Eidos Interactive as well.

It's not really important to fix those names now, when companies will be correctly stored, it will be quite easy to batch-rename company entries.
Doing it manually right now is a waste of time, adding missing companies is more useful ;-)

Tech details:
My plan is to parse all the 55603 games company fields (plain text) and extract all the single companies listed there.
If a company is found on the companies DB, the reference ID is stored, otherwise I'll store just the extracted name.
Then, a new editing page will list all the unclassified companies found, with the option to fix wrong names, like US Gold / U.S. Gold.
The list will be sorted by frequency too, to easily find the most common companies missing.

Naturally, editing game publishers/developers will be different from now, because we will be able to add only known companies. (I've not exactly figured this yet)

Name fixing might not be very important yet, but adding the missing countries at least can be done now :)

Czech and Norway added and related companies edited.

Poland is needed for CD Projekt

Bulgaria is needed for Black Sea Studios

Is it possible to mass rename US Gold to U.S. Gold? There are 411 US Gold titles (publisher) and would like to see them renamed to the UVL official version U.S. Gold. Renaming each single entry takes too long.

I've fixed most of the remaining "US Gold" games: the ones that could quickly fixed with few queries.
There are 43 games left that need editing one by one.

I've added Poland and Bulgaria to the company countries too, and edited the two related companies.