Weird video game library trends

exodus

I never noticed that about the PSP! what a weirdness - I guess I do remember those titles getting smaller and smaller on the relatively tiny boxes, ha ha.

Lacquerware

oprel Daxter couldn’t read the room.

James-

Unlike a lot of systems, I can’t help but notice that the side panel on the PSP boxes is largely black text, white background. I honesty don’t know if I like that or not, but it’s interesting it’s so common.

Pasokon Deacon

That’s a holdover from Japanese PS2 box spine packaging, most of which has the same minimal black-text-on-white format.

Facewizard

The talk about naming conventions here made me think of a trend which is not a mysterious trend at all, and not exactly a library trend, but which I’ve thought about a lot: the sports game standard of naming yearly releases by the year they came out in, with no other subtitles.

For years every time I saw a game title with a year number in it, though, I assumed it would be about sports, so it was VERY funny to me that Farming Simulator, Train Simulator, various boat and truck simulators, et al adopted this directly from the 2k/Activision/EA sports game branding bandwagon with no variation. I guess the audiences of bog standard sports games and PC gamers who love profession sims both react well to reliable, clear, simple naming conventions and don’t give a shit if it’s not exciting to people outside that core audience. So now we got zillions of games named after the year they came out in!! With no other details!!! Wild.

I wish some of these had fun subtitles at the very least, haha. FIFA 2020: Plague Year. Farm Simulator 2020: New Horizons. etc etc

◉◉maru

Facewizard the sports game standard of naming yearly releases by the year they came out in, with no other subtitles.

That’s not the super weird thing. The super weird thing is that, for sports which have their next regular season starting after the Summer holiday (i.e. : the vast majority of them in the West), it’s always the year after the proper year of release which is used. So FIFA 2001 came out in 2000, for instance. I get the initial logic, but it’s still dumb when most of the sales for Madden, FIFA and NBA2K happen way before Christmas.

exodus

ah yeah - this was so pervasive that some indie games spoofed it, though I can’t really think of which. the KOF series did it too, for a time, til they gave up on yearly editions.

Someone on another forum was recently amused by their friend seeing their copy of Super Baseball 2020 for Neo Geo and being like “wow, they still make games for this?” which, well, they do, but in this case the title just happened to catch up to the date, 27 years later!

𝔞𝔷𝔲𝔯𝔢𝔩𝔬𝔯𝔢 𝔤𝔴𝔢𝔫𝔡𝔬𝔩𝔶𝔫 𝔨𝔬𝔯𝔯𝔦𝔤𝔞𝔫

exodus Also

𝔞𝔷𝔲𝔯𝔢𝔩𝔬𝔯𝔢 𝔤𝔴𝔢𝔫𝔡𝔬𝔩𝔶𝔫 𝔨𝔬𝔯𝔯𝔦𝔤𝔞𝔫

Looks like John Madden Football didn’t start with the yearly numbering until ’92, so KoF wasn’t that far behind!

James-

This is straying a bit from the intent of the original post, but continuing along the modern entries and sports sims line, I love that there are still team roster updates for at least one classic sports title. NHL 94 is still being updated by fans with each year’s roster. Who needs NHL 2020 when you can have NHL 94 Season 2020?

exodus

There’s tecmo bowl fans doing the same thing! I appreciate the dedication.

exodus

As an aside, with the prices for US Saturn games skyrocketing in the last years, a few Saturn sports games have actually gained value!? Check out “sold” eBay prices for NHL 98 and NBA action 98. We are talking $40-60 here but I would never have imagined any older sports game costing more than $7. I used to buy these just to harvest their long boxes.

fortninety

I have some friends who are hardcore game collectors, and they get legit angry whenever I bring up the fact how I got rid of all my US Saturn game cases, instruction manuals and all, in college cuz my dorm room was so small. This includes all the super rare, later releases like Panzer Dragoon Saga and Burning Rangers (all the games were put in a CD case, which I still use today).

TBH, I always bring it up cuz I like seeing people get pissed off over the dumbest of things.

James-

fortninety I had to the same thing with my ps1 and ps2 collection. I wound up giving in to my hoarder instincts and keeping the manuals and cover art for almost everything, but even just paring down to that freed up so much space.
I’m big believer that the games deserve to played, not just collected, so if ditching the packaging and manuals (most of which are scanned in online these days) helps make that happen, then that’s the way to go.

exodus

this stuff drives me nuts because - while I agree games should be played, not just collected, I also believe they should be preserved and reused rather than go to landfill, and the best way to ensure that is to keep them together. There’s a guy on another forum who drives me nuts because he saved only the discs for his large PS1 collection, including a lot of rare stuff, junking all the other material. then he wanted to pare down further and sell some of that stuff, but it’s disc only so nobody wants it really, so that’s getting junked too. My feeling is if you don’t care about the physical packaging, use ROMs! Or burns. There’s no good reason to separate discs from their packaging intentionally if you can help it.

I realize you all couldn’t help it for space, but in the case of this other fellow I find it wasteful in terms of both landfill and commerce (like he didn’t have a lot of money and could’ve gotten 10X the money to sell his games complete vs disc only, etc).

James-

exodus I honestly hadn’t ever thought about it like that before. I definitely love a lot of the art and bits that seems to only be on box art/in manuals, which is a lot of what drove me to save them. Preserving them for resell value never really clicked for me b/c I don’t really sell my games at all.
Keeping it all together to preserve it as a whole unit so they can be reused and not just scrapped in the long run makes a lot of sense. (I.e. Why bother with disc only if emulation/burned is just as good and you don’t care about the manual/box anyways)

exodus

that’s the part that’s maddening in particular, but I am a person with a bag full of plastic bags to give back to the store so they can be properly recycled since you can’t just toss them in the bin, so uh… your mileage may vary on all that!

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