StrategyWiki:Staff lounge/2020/October

Stop categorizing series by developers and publishers
Should we drop categorizing by their developers and publishers as detailed here? It seems redundant to me. For example, Focus Multimedia is a developer for. In the subcategories section, it shows the series; but below in the pages section, it also shows all the games they were involved in, which is much more accurate. The two cases I see a minor benefit is: As companies are categorized by their parent and child companies, having these series cats also makes it harder to find the company relations to each other, which I feel is more important that a full series listing (which is already covered in the text or categorized guides). -- Prod (talk) 20:32, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
 * 1) Focus Multimedia shows that there are multiple Petz style series', which wouldn't be as obvious from just the game listing. This is a very rare occurrence and would be obvious by going through the series pages.
 * 2) Ludia and Magic Pockets (company) are listed under, but since there's no guide for the game they worked on, they only have the series under their name. This will eventually be accurate, and there's not much point of having a company page with no games listed.
 * I'd be fine with that since some series have a lot of variation in developers/publishers. Would make more sense if one company developed all games in the series, but that could always change with companies passing off old IPs to work on new projects. -- Wario Talk 17:36, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I kind of feel like Publisher is useless for the reasons that Wario mentioned above, but I feel differently about developer. If it's an original IP (like Mario or Zelda), it makes sense to list the developer, since it's either consistent throughout the series, or it occasionally passes off from one developer to another, depending on who has the license.  If it's not an original IP (like Disney or Popeye), then it makes a little less sense to include developer since that's just a function of who bid the most to make anf market a game for a while.  So I dunno, developer feels like a relevant field in some cases, and less relevant in others.   Pro  cyon  00:57, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
 * At best I see it the other way. For a series with many games developed by the same company, they will all show up in that developer's category. Listing the series doesn't add anything. For a series with games developed by multiple different companies, you'd only see one game in the developer's category, so having the series cat would make it easier to find other games in the series. But that's still just a click away already. -- Prod (talk) 15:52, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

Would LaserTank be within the scope?
Would the game LaserTank be appropriate to add here? 93.173.239.14 09:35, 15 October 2020 (UTC)
 * This is a tough one. It falls under the non-commercial section, but most of the links on wikipedia are from the website itself or just discussions. The journal article is kinda interesting as an independent article, but a bit odd as it's not gaming related. Regarding alternatives, I found http://lasertankpedia.zdobywca.com/, https://lasertankkids.blogspot.com/, and https://lasertankkids.blogspot.com/. The first one seems to already have a lot of information about the game, so I'm not sure if it's a good idea to split the community. -- Prod (talk) 15:45, 15 October 2020 (UTC)