This tutorial teaches the basics of managing the product pages. At VGMdb, we cover the music of Visual Arts and Games. The Product represents the source visual art or game for that music. As such, the product pages will include the visual arts we cover -- namely game, anime, and to a lesser extent any printed publications, notional fantasy worlds, or other products that relate to game or anime. Product submission is currently open to Staff, but I will open it to trusted editors on April 1st. Public editing of the product pages is forthcoming.

Our purpose in hosting product pages is to:

• Provide a cross-reference so that a user can find albums or artists that share a product or franchise
• Provide a way to distinguish music that comes from different releases of the same product on different platforms
• Allow for future cataloging of music-related information of interest (e.g., composer credits for unpublished music, or tracklists for redbooks)

As such, we aren't trying to create a complete taxonomy of games or anime. There are other sites who have this purpose.


1) The Products Hierarchy

Products follow a hierarchy that looks like this.

Franchise --> Title --> Releases

A Franchise is a grouping of products, such as "Final Fantasy" for the Final Fantasy games, or Touhou for all of the Touhou stuff. A Franchise can contain products from different genres. A product can also be linked under multiple franchise, for example, you could put Xmen vs Street Fighter under both the Xmen and Street FIghter franchises.

A Title is what we generally think of as the product. It may be a game or anime with a single release, or it may have been released on multiple platforms in multiple countries, but it is still considered as a single title. Most titles will be part of a franchise, but not all.

A Release is a specific release of a Title. Each platform and each country is a separate release, as are reprintings. The release list can get pretty complicated, and is not so important to reproduce it here if the music is all the same.

2) Submitting a Franchise

A Franchise can be submitted by clicking on the + sign on the products icon. A Title with no Franchise can also be submitted this way.



Name -- The title for the Franchise, supports multi-titles just like the Album pages.

Class -- Chose either Title or Franchise

Medium -- This is not needed if you are creating a Franchise.

Vintage -- This is essentially the release date of the first Title in the Franchise.

3) Editing a Franchise



When you edit a Franchise page, there is an additional box where you can add any relevant notes. These show up at the bottom of the Franchise's page.

4) Adding a Title

Also on the Franchise page is a form you can use to add a Title to that Franchise. This saves you the additional step of linking the Title to a Franchise.



Name -- The title for the Title, supports multi-titles just like the Album pages.

Medium -- Choose the "genre" for this product Title. Current choices are Game, Video, Radio&Drama, Publication, Goods, Other. Most of the time you will be choosing Game or Video.

Class -- Chose either Title or Franchise

Release Date -- The release date for a Title is its first release.

Orgs -- This field can contain a comma-separated list of organizations that can eventually be linked to this product. Developer and Producer can both go here.

Description -- You may add a short description which will be displayed in the top section next to the logo. We haven't explored the use of this field, but I think it can be used to provide a general overview of the Title.

5) Editing a Title

A Title can be edited, but provides no additional options, other than the ability to add logos and websites.




6) Websites

You can add websites to Title pages. The most useful website to add is

Mobygames -- As another database of user-submitted content, I'd like to support them in some way. It's not our purpose to catalog non-music related data about games, but it is theirs. I generally default to using release-date info from their site.

A link to the corresponding game page on Overclocked Remix would also be useful. You can link publisher pages if you want. I'm not sure we need too many other links, unless they are related to the music.

7) Logos



You can upload a logo for any product. This should be the game's official logo if it exists. A stylized title can also be a logo. I've already fielded a question about the Final Fantasy logos, since they postdate the original releases by many years. I don't think we have to be as picky with these, as long as it looks nice and serves the purpose of spicing up the page. Note that the logo field is not the place for box scans. Those belong on Mobygames.

8) Adding Releases

On a Title's edit page, you can add releases to that title. Releases is where this system gets more complicated. Sometimes a game is released on mutliple platforms, and the music is different. To capture this, we sometimes need to add releases to a Title. When a Title has releases, an album can be linked directly to a specific release or releases so that the reader is aware of this when he is trying to find related albums. This is mostly needed for music from older platforms, where music was synthesized by the console, so the soundtrack from the SNES release sounded much different than the same soundtrack for PC-98. So, I don't really expect submitters to add every Release for modern games that appear on Xbox/PS3/Wii/PC with separate release dates in 6 continents.

An alternative use of releases which I don't think I've discussed is for anime, where you can use them to denote different seasons.



Release Date -- Specific release date for this Release

Catalog -- Catalog number for the release

EAC/UPC/JAN -- Universal product code for the release.

Release Type -- You can select doujin/independent for doujin press stuff. Otherwise, leave it as Official Release

Platform -- As on the album pages, the platform for this specific release. You can only select one platform however, so every platform is a separate release.

Region -- The country or region for this release. We are still using the currency list to designate these because it was handy. Eventually I'd like to use flags on the display.

9) "Musically Similar" Releases

If a Title has multiple Releases, sometimes it is convenient to group the ones that have identical music, so that linking up albums doesn't become a nightmare. For example, maybe a game was released on the Wii, PS3, 360 and PC. Let's say the Wii version sounds different, so we want to link an album to just the other releases. We can specify that all of those non-Wii releases are musically similar so that only one of them (say the PC one, since it was released first) shows up during album linking.



To do this, you specify the PC release as the "Musically Equivalent" Parent. This is a future time-saver, because it prevents us from having to go through all of the album links and associate a new release if a "Game of the Year" version is released the following year. In such a case, you just declare that it's musically equivalent to the PC release mentioned above.

I think that covers most of the basics. There is a bit more that I skipped concerning unlinking and relinking Franchises/Titles, but I don't think that will be needed much. Outright deletion of Product pages will probably remain restricted to staff as it is everywhere.

about "adding release"
I was wondering if it should be added even if it wasn't necessary

I saw for some products with date having one specific release with info you can already see but with just platform/country added
lately I added platforms in the notes, however I'm no more sure it's ok

if adding release for each title is sorta recommended, I don't mind editing for much clarity

I think you don't have to add the release info if the music is the same on all platforms. Mobygames is probably a better place to keep track of when something is released on each platform. The only thing it kind of provides is a way to automatically generate the list of platforms on an album page, but we aren't doing that yet.

I've been adding additional platforms for certain games. Like Fatal Fury - most of the albums are for the Neo-Geo version... -except- for Super Famicom Magazine Arrangement Vol.5 Special Supplement. That one specifically refers to the SNES version, so I added the Japanese SNES release and linked it to that.

The addition of releases and logo make the product entry rich, so I like it. We're actually putting info on platform into album pages, but I think the product pages are more appropriate places.
I basically consult ja.wikipedia.org, or the game official sites for Eastern stuff and when looking for info on its localization, en.wikipedia.org.

There's no reason not to add more releases on the product pages, games often have different release dates for consoles and of course the matter of localization title & stuff, along with obligatory different release date too - western game will be released later for the Japanese market and vice versa. I also don't really like to use Mobygames.
Basically, I agree with Cedille.

MobyGames is good, but it lacks a lot of information since it's all user-submitted and they're still missing tons of games.

I use a combination of Wikipedia, MobyGames, official product pages, press releases, Play-Asia (for JAN codes) and GAME Data Room (JP site with release dates and product codes).

It would be nice to know the file type and size you would like of logos.

Some game sites include press kits or fan site kits that come with Logos, like borderlands, age of conan, etc. However these come in huge sized PSD files. 10,629 x 7,200 and 34.4 megabytes, Which I assume is way too big.

The image sits within a 200px fixed-width div, so it really doesn't have to be any larger than that.

I'm looking forward to that day.

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last.fm // youtube // The Wind Waker II (2014)

[nevermind]