Plugin Game Identification (game title wrongly matched as different game of the same title)

[bertbert72]

Problem
When I try to add games using the add_game method in my plugin, it sometimes picks the wrong game. E.g.

matched_games.append(Game(game_id, 'Tomb Raider', None, LicenseInfo(LicenseType.SinglePurchase)))

it is matching to the 2000 GameBoy version, rather than the correct 2013 PC version. If I manually search for Tomb Raider on the IGDB site, the first result is the 2013 version. This has happened for a number of titles, e.g. The Forest (matches 1983 title) and Portal (1986 title).

Solution
Is there some way of forcing a better match? E.g. giving a year, or a platform (PC) or a Steam ID? All of which I have. I'm just not sure how I can use it to help. The Steam ID seems the most exact and I'd have it for maybe 80% of the titles. I could of course be doing something wrong as I'm not clear on how other integrations, e.g. Steam and Epic, have avoided this problem. They don't seem to have done anything clever that I can see.

Alternatives
Maybe define a structure that could be used to populate known information about the game to help with the search, up to defining everything about it.

[mbanczerowski]

Hi @bertbert72,

thanks for the issue. Currently our system matches games using title only. I see no automated workaround for the problem of games with the same title.

What can we do now, is only provide manual fixes based on your report via cogwheel menu - "Report issue" panel. Provide game_id and platform for which the game was not matched correctly and what game it should be matched with.

We'll discuss how to introduce more comprehensive automated solution that covers both known and not yet known games in our database (as the matching process occurs in both situations separately).

You proposal is valid of course. I agree that plugin developer should be able to provide proper correct data on his own. We don't have currently resources to create a bigger scale plan like dedicated panel for developers, but we will discuss internally if we can improve current situation in other way. I cannot provide any ETA - for sure we won't start working on this at this quarter.

[bertbert72]

Thanks Mieszko, I appreciate your answer. For the manual fixes, it would make sense to do that when/if the Geforce Now platform gets added. At that point I can build up a list of titles that don't match and what they should be.