Smart Collections and Database Improvements

Games' main goal has always been to help you keep track of your physical video games collection, and organize it, be able to quickly find if you already have this game you're about to purchase.

I'm excited to announce version 2026.3, which comes with a very exciting new feature to help you do just that.

Smart Collections

Collections were the first step towards this goal. Added to Games in the 2024.2 update, they have been a really nice way to, for example, keep all your Zelda games together.

However, Collections required manual curation, whenever you added a new game, you had to check if it belonged to one of your collections, resulting sometimes, in incomplete collections, or realizing a few months later that you forgot to add your last RPG to the correct collection.

The new Smart Collections feature helps you build collections that update themselves. Choose between the available filters, configure it the way you want, save, and see them change as you add games or edit their metadata.

So create collections, for every Zelda game you own, or your RPGs, or your loose Game Boy games.

Finding the right release

Search for a game to add can be overwhelming, lots of games, lots of variants, depending on the edition or the region, and sometimes it can be hard to choose which game to add, even just by looking at the cover.

As the database improves, a growing number of releases have had their product code and UPC added, and this information is now surfaced when searching for a new game, helping you choose the version matching yours.

The best part is that it will improve, while the database itself gets more and more complete.

Database improvements

The database powering Games contains around 120k games, and navigating through this can be complicated. A lot of work has been done, and a lot still needs to be done. This is an ongoing process, and I wanted to share with you what happened since the app started using its own database.

Before giving numbers, I think a bit of explanation is required.

Grouping

The database is structured with two levels, Game and Release.

A Game represents a title on a specific platform, for example, Burnout Revenge on PlayStation 2. A Release, represents a particular regional or commercial version of that game, such as its US, Japanese or French release.

When the database was initially imported, we had, one game with one release, for each possibility. This is why searching the database can result in a lot of look-alike results. And the ongoing work is to be able to group those similar titles under one Game plus any required number of Releases.

So far, this work has been done for the following platforms: Dreamcast, Famicom Disk System, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, NES, Nintendo 64, Virtual Boy and WonderSwan.

This doesn’t mean that every game or variant is present. It means that known duplicates have been removed and the data for those platforms has been reviewed.

Cleaning

The initial database contains a lot of entries, and not all of them are correctly categorized. There are officially released games, unlicensed games, ROM hacks, homebrews, demos, prototypes, and all of this pollutes the search experience.

Another ongoing work is to classify games into those categories, cleaning up the results, so you can easily find games you own. At this time the search returns, games that are marked as Official, Unlicensed, Demo or not classified yet (no type at all). Other categories (Prototype, ROM hacks, Homebrews, ...) are hidden, because they are less relevant for collectors.

This work is done in parallel with grouping, which means the same platforms listed above, also have their games correctly classified.

Curation

While doing this, a list of 10 to 15 games, highly relevant to a platform, are manually curated. This means tracking the correct covers, product code, publisher, etc. for each release of those games.

Right now this has been done for Dreamcast, GameCube, and Wii U. Also from time to time, games on other platforms are also curated. This might be because I added one of them to my collection, or because it seems important to do so, while doing one of the other processes above.

Numbers

Now, talking about numbers.

Here is a quick summary of how the number of games has changed:

In addition, 1,198 games have been manually curated, which means the data has been cleaned, product ID, UPC, etc. are all correctly filled (as long as the data exist and can be found). That doesn't mean those games won't be modified, but they are at least confirmed and correct.

Here is a quick recap, of the difference between not grouped and grouped games. Still a lot of work to do.

It is better on the classification side, where 11,717, nearly 10% of the database have been classified.

These 3,087 entries (ROM hack, Homebrew, Prototype, Unknown) won't show up anymore in the results, which is a really nice improvement.

One of the next big steps for the database and the app is being able to retrieve games and releases by their UPC. As of now, 3,631 releases across 1,248 games have an assigned and confirmed UPC, not enough to be able to find all the games you own, but we are on our way! Here is a breakdown of the work done in the last months.

What's next

My top priorities are Barcode Scanning and Custom Entries, both of which will make managing your collecting easier. There is still a lot of database work to do before barcode scanning becomes viable. If you are interested in helping test the feature when it's ready, you can contact us at contact@getgames.app.

Custom Entries are another major project. They will let you add games to your collection that are not yet in the database. To make this more powerful, information about the game, not your personal information, could be optionally sent to the database to improve it for everyone.

As always, thank you for using Games! Good collecting!