Suggestion for Developer/Publisher Infobox

[RGamer 0]

I have seen this issue thrown around a bit with no real answer, so I decided to take the issue to the forums.

 

Over time, developers and publishers can go by several different names. The names on the game boxes say what the developers and publishers are at the time, but do not carry over in future alliterations of games.

 

We have been trying to figure out a way to show this in the wiki, and I have come up with a simple way to show this change on the wiki.

 

In the current Infobox, we could add a small section underneath that resembles this crude drawing I made in paint.

 

This would be relevant for the developer Danger Close Games:

 

 

It would show who the developer/publisher was named previously and who they become eventually should it be relevant.

 

What do you all think?

 

[Suicide machine 53]

Yeah. Today, I was adding People Can Fly, just to find out - they were also rebranded recently to Epic Games Poland. Not to mention, Danger Close was already rebranded to DICE Los Angeles. The whole idea is just annoying. Actually, I was thinking about that problem recently a bit, as well. I don't really like the idea of splitting the developer pages, just because someone decided that a developer should changed a name, but currently - it's impossible to both keep a proper developer name in a auto-generated table without splitting it to different pages.

 

I think we could for example, always use a current name of a developer and do redirects from such "EA Los Angeles" and "Danger Close" to (current) "DICE Los Angeles" - of course then adding previous names with dates when they were used to an infobox, but not everyone may like that idea.

 

What I really think we should do however and I really don't see a reason why we shouldn't do it - is to state ownership along with dates - it's not because, developers are often bought out, but what current system is doing is basically states that "this developer was always owned by EA, Ubisoft, whatever" - when this is often not a case. Many of them used to be private and with publisher buying developer out, we can often see a clear changes in a way developer makes games.

 

I'm going to make some images, to better explain what I imagine both situations would look like.

[Nicereddy 109]

I think simply adding a new parameter titled "Previous names" or "Deprecated names" and allow users to list all previous names there (along with years?) would be helpful. I don't know if this is possible, but theoretically we could also have the template automatically create pages for those titles listed in the infobox which would then redirect to the developer's current title.

[Suicide machine 53]

Here are photoshopped examples:

and

 

Except... when I finished making these examples, I realized - our game pages always list items in a new line, so it would be:

Website (new line, align to the right) adress to page (next line)

Founded (new line, align to the right) 1998 etc. It would still look like kind of like this, I guess. Although, with the way we're doing Parent Company, this may be still problematic to implement. The good thing is - even expended, such infobox would still probably fit the screen, without adding a slider for scrolling.

[Nicereddy 109]

I completely support the idea of redirects and agree that anything more than that would negate the potential usefulness of the Semantic structure you've created. This sounds like a very good implementation of the idea, thanks Soeb.

[Nicereddy 109]

Small thing, but does the third row in "Fromer names" only say "2010-", wouldn't it have either an ending point or say Current to match with the Parent Company section?