Introducing Library Of Videogame Collectors

[sinanspd]

Alright first of all, this isn't meant to be competition or replacement to the forum and I hope it isn't perceived as such. It is more of a compilation of features that I had was available to me as a collector.


So what the heck is it?

At the very core, it is a database of ALL the official items printed for a select group of games. This includes anything from retail releases to giant booths at expos and conventions, to press items, to developer gifts. It has a very fine grained searching mechanism. You can search by category, filter for promo only items, search items that came in larger bundles like collectors editions and more.

In addition, you can mark the items you have in your own collection, add notes (visible only to you), upload your pictures.

You can add items to your wishlist. Coming soon:

1) The site will be scanning 52 global marketplaces and notify you if the item on your wishlist comes to market.

2) You will be able to keep a unified watchlist across all marketplaces. So you no longer have to go to ebay, mercari etc one by one to remind yourself what you were considering buying. You will mark the items through a browser plugin while browsing and they will appear in your account on the site. You also leave public comments like "oh this is scratched on the right corner" while browsing and when anyone with the plug in is browsing that item, that will see your comment and make a more informed decision.

How does it work?

There is a very exhaustive crawler on the backend that goes through all the public resources and their history post 2010, including Studio socials/blogs, official stores first party/licensor, socials of developers who work at the studio as well as a number of youtube videos (video processing is not computationally cheap so it is scoped smaller and is experimental). Once all these resources are compiled by the algorithm, an expert, who is very familiar with the title's merchandising history combs through, picks apart a few false negatives and serves as an editor to touch up the parsed descriptions.

How can you help?

I am taking on the expert role TLOU, Returnal and Days Gone. If anybody wants to volunteer for any other games hit me up. I will also consider making an entry for major collecting categories such as vinyl, artbooks etc.


A few things I would love to add if anybody wants to help:

Hellblade
Press kits
Shadow of Colossus (remake cycle only probably)
Hollow Knight
Sekiro

but I will consider other suggestions if a worthy expert steps forward.


Here is the link:

https://lovgc.com

Example item:

https://lovgc.com/i/tlou100

Because I have no life, I am doing photo and video shoots for all the items in my possession so if you don't have time to become an expert but would like to support me at a personal level

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awv9VUafgAk

THE SITE IS IN BETA. THERE MAY BE SMALL BUGS

[Codreanu]

The database here hasn't been updated for a long time and only included Collector's Editions, no press kits and such. I also don't think there are any ambitions to continue maintaining the CE database - I could be wrong, but at least that's my impression.

This isn't criticism of the operators of CE Forums and the database btw. We all eventually lose interest in, or don't have time for, our hobbies. The truth is that the forum isn't as active as it used to be either. And we, who are still here, didn't stay because of the database anyway.

I think your lovgc has a lot of potential. When it grows a bit and includes more franchises that I collect myself, I would probably use it for cataloging and finding some items.

I'm afraid I won't be of any help in expanding the database though. For one thing, I don't have as much free time as I used to (you can see how long it takes me to take pictures for the press kit thread) and for another, I wouldn't consider myself an expert on any franchise (even the ones I collect myself).

For example, I couldn't say for sure which promo item is real or how many exist.

Anyway, I like what you're doing and I hope you find people who have the knowledge and time to support you!

[johncorvo]

Will be difficult to pinpoint if certain promo items are indeed real or not, as different regions do different stuff too, but for big franchises it will be interesting for sure

[sinanspd]

Yeah the forum has a certain number of problems. As you said it isn't anything to do with the staff but more fundamental stuff. One being, the software isn't fully controlled by the staff, I am sure this is built on an existing forum engine. The second came from the fact that this was built very early on. If you look at some of the very early posts, there are a lot of posts that don't belong in the section they are in. The forum opened new boards as the hobby evolved but never rearranged and moved the older stuff.

But perhaps the biggest issue I have is thale fact that images aren't hosted by the forum. A lot of the image hosting services that were used early on went out of business and now those images are not accessible, the members are no longer active, making a good 30-40%, maybe more of the posts here rather useless. For example, one person posted about a release event for TLOU they went to in Argentina back in the day and posted the items they got there. The pics are gone so is he and I have no idea what they were.

Following that is the lack of a proper search functionality. Any time I need to find an older thread I just google the keywords along with collectorsedition.org to find what I am looking for.


In terms of the amount of work needed.

1) It is very important to highlight that this is never meant to be a comprehensive catalog of all games, not even all AAA games. Even if an expert volunteer steps forward, I will be very selective in terms of what I let through and what not. In the Request section for example I make it clear that I am staying away from Japanese studios with a few exceptions like From Soft. Companies like Square Enix, I am convinced have released more merch than the number of lines of code in their games, and I just can't be fucked with. It is neither worth running the core algorithm for something like that nor worth hosting all those images. Same goes for Ubisoft.


2) for everything else, the algorithm does a pretty good so far. 3 games advertised + 3 others I haven't put up yet (for reasons I will explain below) it had very good accuracy. Even for a very large title with 1K + items like last of us, if I remember correctly it returned 40-50 "unsure" items it couldn't determine the origin of. I was able to manually track down 13 of them. The rest even I couldn't find anything definitive on. I will put those under a "help needed" section later and try to crowd source the info. Most of the work I had to do, came from work I created for myself. Adding measurements of items, shooting videos and pics etc.

I can give a brief explanation of how this works:.

I built a company a while back with the Grammy winning musician Chris Adler and Jason, who used to run digital marketing of Sony music. The platform essentially micro optimizes a musician's career using data from the entire industry as a whole, to stay ahead of trends etc. It also evaluates audience response by constantly monitoring social media, forums etc. and performing sentiment analysis and topic association.

In addition, it constantly scans sites like Etsy, red bubble and other "on demand" bootleg sites to automatically issue cease and desist notices for copy right infringement.

The core of the system is pretty much borrowed from those systems. I combined it with a fake news/quote misattribution/deep fake detection algorithm I build back in 2015. (it had 92% accuracy in 2016 elections and was adapted by all the big socials at the time) to do another step of fine grained filtering and to deal with things those automated bot accounts that try to dump a scammer shirt site on Twitter as soon as you utter the words "where can I get this?" Or "that's a cool design".

The video part is still experimental. It searches YouTube for expo walkthroughs and I also compiled and maintain a comprehensive list of influencers from all regions so their socials and channels are constantly scanned for new content. And this was the reasoning behind not including anything pre 2010. Videos shot before that simply doesn't have enough resolution for accurate results from our detection algorithm.

3) I was GDC last month, and I sat down with quite a few companies. Can't announce who yet but you will see it soon enough. We are working on partnerships which allows me to get an already compiled list of everything they printed then I only have to deal with the regional stuff local publishers made. I will be adapting the algorithm we use for the musicians for them, and using the data of how many views something gets, how many people add to wishlist. I will help them adapt their merchandising strategy to speak better to their customer base. All the company acknowledged their existing merch sucks and sometimes sits in the warehouse for years so after seeing the results we got in the music industry, they were excited to get onboard.