Splitting "Nintendo" page into NoE, NoA, NCL, etc?

Guys. The wiki is a mess. Standards are often hearsay or hidden in some comment in a thread.

Sony isn't just Sony on here but has distinct pages for SCEE, SCEA, SCE Inc. ... for the respective region.

Given that Nintendo's history extends a lot farther into the past, there are a lot more releases that would benefit from more detailed information. Lots of games have been solely published by Nintendo Co. Limited (the Japanese mothership) or Nintendo of America or Nintendo of Europe or Nintendo of Australia over the years. The Secret of Mana page would probably look a lot less confusing if the publisher field wouldn't list simply "Nintendo" next to Squaresoft and Square Enix but instead "Nintendo of Europe" as it would immediately explain the situation. Or why does Rayman Legends have "Nintendo" tagged as publisher, well, because NCL published it in Japan!

Now, Sony Corporation has a dedicated page for the umbrella company without any game associations. Nintendo wouldn't need that as NCL already covers this.

What sayeth you, fellow bombers. This would also open the door to create a Nintendo of Korea page and start including Korea-exclusive titles, for example.

Should the Nintendo page become Nintendo Co. Limited and new pages be created for the regional subsidiaries? I would happily take care of it.

I think it's well-known among staff and moderators that the companies portion of the wiki has always been a mess. Some have far too many branches and subsidiaries to make sense of. Splitting Nintendo in such a way would only add to that problem.

It doesn't make sense to do one company one way and the others another way.

It's obvious they should all be treated the same, just a question of who is going to do the work and whether the answer is to split or combine.

To me, if Giantbomb wants to be an actually useful database of videogame history/information, the only solution is to split them out.

I'm not certain this is the case, but I don't think Nintendo of America, Nintendo of Europe, etc. are technically subsidiaries in a legal/business sense - I think they are divisions within Nintendo. As opposed to SCEA, SCEE, SOE, etc. which actually are separate subsidiaries of Sony Computer Entertainment which is itself a subsidiary of Sony Corporation.

@geraltitude: Splits and mergers happen so often, and companies have so many subsidiaries an labels, that it seems unfeasible to make that happen in an effective manner. Do a search on Konami and look at the number of results. Which are publishers? Developers? Which still exist, or have merged or split at some point in history? Where would you put labels like Ultra Games that were used only to get around certain NES era release restrictions? Now, how would you apply all of these questions in splitting up Nintendo or Capcom?

As a non-paying member who has done very little work on the wiki I can't say that my opinion likely has much weight, but I wanted to say that I would prefer it if the Publisher section simply contained different fields for different countries and regions. That fixes the problem of understanding what publisher published what game where. My issue with splitting it up is one I have on other game databases. If I want to look for a game published by Nintendo in the distant past or future it is a lot easier to just look under Nintendo then to look under the dozen different subsidiaries. An example. Back in the day on Gamespot I would occasionally look at the list of upcoming games Sony was publishing to get a sense of what exclusives were hitting their consoles in the upcoming years. The problem was that games that hadn't been officially announced for one region or another didn't have that division of Sony listed under their publisher field. So I would have to navigate between a half dozen pages to see the full list of games. So I would prefer that all international divisions of publishers get listed under the core company.

The only time a company should be split should be in the case of developer as it is important to know which branch of a developer worked on a game. For example, Crytek Kiev is a very different group of developers than Crytek UK or the core Crytek team in Germany. Knowing which team made which game is important for obvious reasons. Knowing which regional division of a publisher published a game? Who cares? Just let editors add regions to the publisher field so people know which publisher published what games where. It will solve the problem without adding to the confusion these splits make.

Another thing to note is that in a lot of cases, these regional subsidiaries are nothing more than holding companies that exist primarily for tax or legal purposes.

It seems like the answer to this, as is the case with a lot of wiki stuff unfortunately as it seems like changes are incredibly time-consuming and difficult, is that a bit of new functionality is needed. If we could still attach say, Nintendo, as a publisher, but then be able to write in next to it, "NoA" if that was the branch of the company listed in the game's credits, then we could still give out accurate information while not having to make company pages for any random division that a parent company made for whatever random reason.

Still, aside from that kind of change (which will never happen), I think the most important goal to strive for in any wiki entry/edit is accuracy. What our wiki says should be as identical as possible to the credits in a game. So maybe for now separate company pages that you can attach to their games are warranted, and we could always merge them in the future.

Isn't that just the fault of wiki entries that aren't thorough enough? Ideally, all of your questions would be easily answered by just looking at the content of those pages.

I remember Jeff once saying he wants company pages to show the history of the company with name changes, timelines and mergers. I think Snider responded by saying "We're just programmers Jeff, not magicians." And he's right, this is a very difficult thing to master. In fact I don't think any game wiki has figured it out. As others have said, it's very difficult to keep track of companies since they frequently merge, get acquired, change their name or dissolve. A lot of these companies exist in name only and some are legit studios. But it's difficult to find this information, as it's often not very public.

hey, man, I didn't say it'd be easy, but it would be the right thing to do.

But, there's never going to be another amazing videogame wiki on the internet, so in my opinion we should make the one that does exist the Ultra Best Wiki ever.

In the case of Ultra Games you would go to all the games very specifically released under that game (maybe for a given region) and put Ultra Games. The company page would then explain just what the Ultra Games mess was all about.

But I mean hey if every person who actually contributes a lot to the wiki wants to say Nah, too much work, never gonna do it, then, you know, it is what it is. And faaiiiire enough.

Ideally the wiki would just have tiered slots for publishers based on region, etc, but that's not too likely.

I just feel like history is lost if every game says NINTENDO published this when really it was X, Y or Z.

The fact that it was, in some cases, just holding companies like @chaser324 (hey I memorized it!) said is actually part of the interesting history.

I know, lots of work. But that's my answer.

I doubt that's the case here. Nintendo of America has a very active history separate from the Japanese branch, like its censorship policies or Operation Rainfall.

@video_game_king: Yeah, I was speaking a bit more generally. Not necessarily the case with Nintendo.

The bottom line is this: corporate structures are fucked up and hard to keep track of.

Not really. As others have said, trying to add the proper detail to the respective company entries in the wiki is a crazy complex endeavor.

What I usually do when it comes to companies and who releases what where, is if I know who the publisher is for each region, I try to call it out in the body of the specific game's article. However, I don't go so in depth that I call out NCL versus Nintendo of America versus Nintendo of Europe. For The Last Story, for example, I just wrote that Nintendo released the game in Japan and Europe, and that the North American release was handled by XSEED. It's the same basic information that can be found in the page's sidebar, but given more context.

I know for sure we've had this discussion at least once sometime in the distant past, and I think it resulted in a bunch of changes being made to company pages. However, we suffered an unfortunate loss of all of our old moderator threads when we moved over to the new site, and I have about 20,000 messages in my inbox with no way to search through them.

Maybe one of the other old timers remembers.

I think a good way to handle it would be to allow a games page to display a certain alias of a company. Of course I am sure that it will require too much work to implement that, but I think it would be helpful. That way the one single Nintendo page can have the alias of something like NOA or NOE and when putting Nintendo as the publisher whichever alias is the correct for that title can be shown.