It's been nearly 2.5 years since I launched WOS. In that time the site has catalogued nearly 2,500 games, over 10,000 reviews, and ranked nearly 1,500 games.
The support from the community has been amazing. Review partners, developers, publishers, and of course everyone who's ever visited the site, checked out the ratings, found a new game to buy. It wouldn't be the same without you.
I've done my best to keep on top of the flood of new releases, while also developing new features for members and partners, not to mention building a vast array of tools on the admin side.
This is where you come in!
Keeping on top of the new releases is doable on my own, but a few areas could do with a bit of a boost. I haven't identified specific roles, as some of these are bigger than others.
Games (core):
I do a lot of this myself, but there are a few things that could be improved:
- Reviewing updates from Wikipedia (these are automatically imported for review). Accepting these changes, or skipping them.
- Checking and updating release dates for US and Japan.
- Adding video URLs for games.
- Giving input on the multi-regional features of the site, and whether we should do more here.
- Keeping an eye on the recent change history to games. Nudging me to add more to this area, as not all changes are tracked here :)
- Helping with the rollout of member features, including getting members to help with updating the games database.
Categorisation:
Most of this is to do with the "Browse by" links on the Games page. Specific areas include:
- Identifying primary types and assigning them to games.
- Identifying tags and assigning those, too.
- Converting genres from eShop data into primary types and/or tags, where relevant.
- Identifying games that are part of a series, and tagging them as such.
- Using the existing tools, and suggesting changes to make them work better.
Partnerships:
I'll continue managing the relationships with review partners. We do need some help with developer and publisher partnerships. Specifically:
- Data cleansing and migrating from the old way of storing developers and publishers to a new and improved way. (This is already built, but might need some extra tools built or it'll be a lot of manual effort.)
- Filling in website URLs and Twitter IDs for developers and publisher records.
- Reaching out to developers and publishers, and getting them to sign up. Looking for new features to add value for these partners.
eShop:
A lot of this is automated for the European eShop. Some things to look at include:
- Keeping an eye out for games with missing prices, and filling those in.
- Keeping game data accurate, and watching out for discrepancies with eShop or Wikipedia data. (Not all of the data on the eShop is accurate...)
- Working with me to determine if we should import data from other eShops, such as US or Japan.
- Watching out for missing field errors, and making sure I see these. (Small job)
- Analysing the data we import from the eShop, and suggesting ways to expose this on the site.
Why join?
WOS is a labour of love for me. I want to get more people using the site and make it more useful. I don't make any money from the site - it costs a little to run. It means I can't offer payment for helping out. But if you'd like to contribute as much or as little time as you can spare, you can be part of a really exciting project, and help Switch gamers like you to find the games they won't want to miss.
Interested? Get in touch: ben.barden@worldofswitch.com / Twitter: @worldofswitch (DMs open)
- Ben
Founder, WOS