MobyGames

[Antrad 37]

In the area under the game cover art there are links to Wikipedia, SteamDB, Wine... and other stuff. I recommend to add MobyGames there too, since Wikipedia is a general online encyclopedia and MobyGame is basically an online encyclopedia for video games and people often already add the links to it in the general info section. Many old obscure and less known games don't have a Wikipedia page, but I have yet to find an old game without a MobyGames page.

[Mars icecream 57]

I also wish for MobyGames to be added to the article infobox. The website excels in high-quality cover and disc scans.

[JohnRen 0]

Is MobyGames still being constantly updated by the way?

[Garrett 211]

MobyGames is still being updated. If you go to the "Updates" menu at the top of MobyGames you'll find links for pages such as New Games and Game Updates.

New games show up more quickly on PCGamingWiki because of a difference in approach: PCGamingWiki has VetleBot automatically adding anything released on Steam whereas on MobyGames any crawled game data has to be approved before it shows up for regular visitors.

[Andytizer 269]

In terms of linking to other game websites - my preference for the health of PCGamingWiki project, is to have mutual linking with other sites. This has immense SEO benefits. For example we have a system for WSGF-PCGamingWiki article links, and also SteamDB and IsThereAnyDeal etc.

MobyGames seems like a good place to link to - but before we do anything I'd like to get in touch with the admin and see if there's anything we can do as a partnership.

Does anyone have the contact details for the current admin? Best to get in touch via.. Discord, or Twitter?

[Garrett 211]

The MobyGames staff are very active on the Discord server (or for email see the Contact page).

[Andytizer 269]

I've gotten in touch with Simon Carless of MobyGames and will see how it goes.

[Andytizer 269]

MobyGames have declined my proposal of mutual linking - not citing any reasons.

I don't really see much value in linking to them, they don't really provide any useful information for PC gamers - Wikipedia has much more useful information. I would prefer to dedicate resources to more compatible websites, e.g. I was looking at ProtonDB.

[Mars icecream 57]

On 6/11/2019 at 10:46 PM, Andytizer said:

MobyGames have declined my proposal of mutual linking - not citing any reasons.

I don't really see much value in linking to them, they don't really provide any useful information for PC gamers - Wikipedia has much more useful information. I would prefer to dedicate resources to more compatible websites, e.g. I was looking at ProtonDB.

That's unfortunate.

I consider high-quality cover art (not limited to the front/back image) scans as useful information, this is (presumably) additional design created by the art team and I've sourced images from there.

[Guest]

On 6/11/2019 at 3:46 PM, Andytizer said:

MobyGames have declined my proposal of mutual linking - not citing any reasons.

I don't really see much value in linking to them, they don't really provide any useful information for PC gamers - Wikipedia has much more useful information. I would prefer to dedicate resources to more compatible websites, e.g. I was looking at ProtonDB.

I agree. It's more like a general library card listing digital warehouse (which, coincidentally, has free-to-use box art scans), not a specialized preservation and documentation center like PCGW.

[Antrad 37]

On 6/11/2019 at 9:46 PM, Andytizer said:

MobyGames have declined my proposal of mutual linking - not citing any reasons.

I don't really see much value in linking to them, they don't really provide any useful information for PC gamers - Wikipedia has much more useful information. I would prefer to dedicate resources to more compatible websites, e.g. I was looking at ProtonDB.

I disagree that Wikipedia is more useful, since I already wrote in the first post that many games or game developers don't have a Wikipedia article, but Moby Games does. Try finding any information about Brilliant Digital Entertainment and their games like Cyberswine and all you get is what is on Moby Games (probably one of the reason Telltale gets credit for innovation in adventure game genre and online episodic content while BDE did exactly the same things already back in 1997, people completely forgot about BDE).

Not only does Moby Games have covers that most people here use when making articles, but they also have system requirements listed which I use when these obscure games don't even have them in readme.

In the end it doesn't matter now, since they don't want to cooperate.

[Andytizer 269]

Because we are heavily basing our Taxonomy on that of MobyGames, I've decided to implement MobyGames linking. 

My hope is that once PCGamingWiki becomes big enough MobyGames will feel obligated to link back to us!

We will sort out implementation of this very soon, I have yet to receive an API from MobyGames.

Here is the relevant discussion on taxonomy if anyone is interested:

 

[Faalagorn 5]

Nice! 🙂 In the meantime, you could try reaching to ProtonDB as you mentioned before or Lutris, they are both active on their respective Discords and PCGW is really friendly toward Linux so a mutual agreement here could work well 🙂

[Andytizer 269]

@Faalagorn I've implemented ProtonDB linking in the infobox now as well.

[Faalagorn 5]

3 hours ago, Andytizer said:

@Faalagorn I've implemented ProtonDB linking in the infobox now as well.

Thanks! :)