UVL no longer the largest Database out there? ( edit: False! )

http://www.gamestats.com/

According to there website the cover over 62000 and counting. They have roughly 500 more games in there than we do.

Just saying.

Part of IGN network, so it has the benefit of gamefaqs and other IGN game related sites.

The big number doesn't tell the whole story. Looking at the platforms individually reveals numbers such as UVL having over 900 games for a platform that gamestats only list less than 120 for. They list many platforms separately that UVL includes within our existing platforms. Such as iPhone, iPod, iQue, Jaguar CD, LCD games, LED games, Intel Mac, NeoGeo CD, and BlackBerry Just to name a few. Also UVL has the advantage of considering more platforms than gamestats does (just not separated). BeOS, KC 85 (there is a lot more of these than currently listed), OS/2, Pandora, and Nextstep for example. We also include mainframe computer games and games for other early platforms that were the foundation of the current state of the art. UVL could easily get a bigger number by separating these out and filling them in with all released games. Something else to consider is the fact that gamestats includes platforms that UVL does not include in in way. Such as ClickStart, digiBLAST, Didj, Entertaible. FLY Pentop, Game Wave, HyperScan, PocketStation, Red Jade, Pico, Tiger R-Zone, Timecade, and more. They also include standalone TV game systems as a separate platform. A major platform that gives gamestats a potentially huge numbers advantage is the Pinball category.

I'm not at all advocating we try to fiddle with the platforms only for the sake of having a bigger number. Platforms should be separated on their own merits. I think that, as it stands, UVL does list more game titles than gamestats and always will, despite the way we the big numbers are calculated. However, they do have us beat for having a much higher average completion of basic information per game. We should continue to work on that.

It is all a matter of editor manpower (or the lack of it) that UVL starts to lose ground compared to other (professionally driven) databases. When I would have the time to update UVL more than the "here and then updates" I currently do with my "owned" games, we had much more games in the database. Take the platform Micro 7/FM 7 for example. I do have a (Japanese) list of nearly every game for that system in my hands. It would be just a matter of time to work through them and put them in UVL and *whoosh* it would be the completest list in an English speaking database that I know of and we had 500 more games total. Same for other systems, which sometimes already have 3000 games in UVL, but with enough dedication to re-check with other databases could easily have the double amount (Spectrum, C64, PC, PS2).

Edit:
Oh oh I just looked at the newest FM7 list and it has 3800+ entries (not all of them games though). UVL right now has 33 games in the db. Just to give an example of what huge amounts are still available to enter.

Nothing else to add to the thread.
I feel a bit guilty for my recent slowness on development ( but since 2007 I've always worked on the code... needed a break ) so I was worried the editors could leave, but this wasn't the case, cool! :-)

I'm finally back on my tracks, can't wait to finish the releses stuff, and check all the open issues.

Look like everyone has a list of games to add. I swear to finally add a way to quickly import games list, via the CREQ tools.

Due to some combined effort of some editors here in the last couple days, UVL is in front again and will hopefully stay on top.

Statistical competition :D

Since the initial post, I've noted something about gamestats entries I've encountered in my search for videogame info. Gamestats has a big problem with average completion of basic information per game also. Not that we should let that fact decrease our motivation.

[[quote:Since the initial post, I've noted something about gamestats entries I've encountered in my search for videogame info. Gamestats has a big problem with average completion of basic information per game also. Not that we should let that fact decrease our motivation.]]

In addition to GameStats not have any information on the Zeebo! =P

Not that it wants to say much... =D

Anyway, now it is 63353 vs 66061 for us, and we are quite sure that we have much more info about less known / oldest games.

They have tons of multiple games too ( bundles, packs, demo version, premium version, limited version, etc. ) so I think their numbers are much less than that.

But thanks to their network, I think they have more data about "modern" games anyway.

67000 and counting .... :-)

I found this thread interesting, so I quickly went through my bookmarks of the game database sites I use most often, to see what they each reported as their tallies... here goes, as of 2011-02-12:



I'm really not sure what to think of the GameSpot number, but that is the number of entries that come up in their "All Games" table.
Also there's the differences in counting. The numbers of those marked with (C) should be regarded as equivalent to much higher counts, as these databases count multi-platform titles only once in a combined entry. Thus for example OGDB is much more complete than it might seem. Also, and I realised this only after making the list, in contrast to the other sites, Absolute Games deals with PC titles exclusively, so that's a pretty impressive number indeed (even more so given that they seem to have screenshots on almost everything).

Edit: Corrected the count of The Legacy in the list, I was looking in the wrong place.

That's interesting.

I tried to understand how does Gamespot have so many games, I compared some platforms (UVL vs GameSpot) :

Arcade => 4384 vs ~2050
PC => 6752 vs ~14100
CPC => 3780 vs ~1600
PS1 => 4160 vs ~2500
X360 => 651 vs ~3500 + ~100 XBLA
Xbox => 1359 vs ~1200

So it seems that they lack some older games (CPC, PS1) but they have a lot of games for recent systems + PC games, but this still does not explain the very high figure (116000).

Plus, the 3500 games for X360 seems very high to me (IGN has only ~540, for example).


EDIT : OK, I got it - they have ~42450 IPhone/IPod games (+3250 for BlackBerry & 500 for Android).

Haha, wow, thanks for clearing that up! They must be running a crawler over the iPhone App Store or something.

OGDB has 40960 versions of games currently. But in contrast to UVL they list the same games sold in different regions of the world as different versions.

Example:
Version Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 [Microsoft Xbox 360/Deutschland] (2010)
Version Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 [Microsoft Xbox 360/Vereinigtes Königreich] (2010)
Version Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 [Microsoft Xbox 360/Nordamerika] (2010)
Version Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 [Nintendo Wii/Deutschland] (2010)
Version Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 [Nintendo Wii/Nordamerika] (2010)
Version Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 [PC - DVD-ROM/Deutschland] (2010)
Version Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 [SONY PlayStation Portable/Deutschland] (2010)
Version Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 [SONY PlayStation Portable/Nordamerika] (2010)
Version Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 [SONY PlayStation2/Deutschland] (2010)
Version Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 [SONY PlayStation2/Nordamerika] (2010)
Version Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 [SONY PlayStation3/Deutschland] (2010)
Version Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 [SONY PlayStation3/Nordamerika] (2010)

So they have a total of 12 versions of Pro Evo Soccer 2001, while UVL would have only 6.

Would be interesting to know if other sites do this the same way.

The Legacy is a longtime mystery to me. I really like how dedicated the people behind the site take the topic and they seem to be collectors/archivists similar to myself, but I really don't get over the design of the site. I don't need fancy new webdesign technologies to be happy with a site. I especially like the simple old-school approach of hardcoregaming101.net for example, which shows that interesting content is more important than modern website layouts. But The Legacy is unnavigatable (does this word exist?) in its current form.

Thanks for noticing this.

The "issue" with the iPhone appstore is that there are tons of games with a quality much lower than the average Flash game.
( just see ow many "angry birds" clones are there : http://itunes.apple.com/us/genre/ios-games/id6014?mt=8&letter=A&page=10 )
This is because there is the chance of making some bucks on it ( even with the free ones: with ads, DLC, or promotion to other not free games ) so almost anyone that has a Mac ( the only developing platform for iPhone games ) is developing some apps.
Add to this the fact that for each game there is at least the "lite" version, the HD version, one more for each language, end even the habit of releasing a new app instead of just upgrading the old one ...

About the X360 games, I don't know much about the platform, looking at their list all seems ok, but almost any other gaming site lists much less games for it.

Listing demo/trial (free/lite) versions separately is quite notable bloat in the app store, dunno how many other sites do that.

Yes, the iPhone games are sometimes real pathetic, but the question is where do you draw the line, if any? If your goal is to document every game, for that system as well, I think it's justifiable to just crawl the list (sans the demo/HD/update issue of course), otherwise it starts to be editorial.

@teran01:
The Legacy have been planning a complete redesign of their site (and I believe also rewrite of backend code) for what feels like an eternity now. I believe it was about 5 years ago that I thought about responding to one of their requests for volunteer help, but decided that I didn't have enough time to invest. I think theirs is simply the same problem. I know how hard and frustrating it is to rewrite something that has grown organically over so many years... and you find all sorts of excuses to not have to look at the horrible code you wrote so long ago :) but it seems to me the team is still very dedicated to the project, and I'm confident that the redesign will still come.

I use The Legacy very often, so I have gotten used to it and I don't find it all that cumbersome to navigate anymore. But if you haven't spent a lot of time there, it can be really hard to find all the functionality that is hidden behind some frustratingly places, tiny text link. I sometimes still have to search around for a while when trying to access their collection management functions!

Android and iPhone also have many many not actually games listed as if they were. Such as game related utilities, emulators, and just plan slide-shows.

Affiliated to Giant Bomb, so they have at least the recent games.

They have nearly 60000 games in their database. Not as much as UVL, but they easily beat us with PC games (14386 games).

http://www.giantbomb.com/platforms/?sort=most_games

I will dig around that site a bit more, just to see how deep their descriptions are for non-well-known games.

I don't think they have any information of their own at all, they simply mirror GiantBomb's main Wiki pages for each game, under their CC-3.0-by-nc license.

UVL reached 70000 games!

Congratulations!
You have added the 70000th game, and will receive a life-time PREMIUM membership to UVL!

Many thanks to all the editors for reaching this outstanding milestone.

I found another potential database project that "threatens" UVL with its numbers. Pampi Game Database - http://pampi2.dyndns-server.com - has 53660 games in the database now.

That site however is quite a mystery to me and I wonder what its purpose is. I don't think it is frequented by many users so far, has no community and lacks good features. It seems this database is created by datamining other specialized sites. C64 -> Gamebase64, Amiga games -> lemonamiga, Atari ST -> atarilegend.com and so on. They even have the same screenshots from the said sites. At least they tell you were the data is from. However they are still lacking lots of platforms and if they datamine more sites, Pampi could beat UVL in numbers in the long run.

The number is inflated greatly, IMO. For examples: some shareware games are listed for each episode instead as a whole (e.g. Biomenace; though to be fair, some of these might've been sold separately, but they're usually listed as one product). Other games are listed multiple times (once for each version, e.g. Doom). Pretty sure you can find other similar cases.

You're right... Doom and Doom II (PC only) are 47 entries... ! Because of the different versions, addons, expansions, compilations, construction kit, etc...

BTW: Gamestats (the site that started this thread) is discontinued...

By pure numbers gamefaqs (or its parent Gamespot if you want) beats us due to the 100k+ Iphone games alone.

Probably also Android and other mobile games, but most mobile games are shovelware anyway much like most Flash games, so I don't think it matters that much.

Where did you dig up this old thread from :-) --- Congratulations to reaching 140K game entries.

So great! Thankyou to all the editors!
I'll celebrate releasing some new improvements in the next weeks :)