Feedback wanted on Switch Scores categorisation

With the Switch fast approaching its 3rd year, and the games library at well over 3000 titles, discovering new games is getting more difficult. In this time, the eShop has only had incremental updates, which doesn't help to surface some of the lesser known titles from the last few years.

The eShop has "genres", which helps a bit, but not a lot. These are broad categories that can be useful (Puzzle, Sports, Strategy to name a few). Some are less useful, such as Action, Adventure, Party - as these are not always used correctly - and "Action" alone is used on a huge number of games).

At Switch Scores we have a few ways of categorising games to help you discover Switch games in the catalogue:

Primary types (categories)

These are for broad categories like Puzzle, Racing, RPG - similar to the eShop. However, there are two clear distinctions with primary types. Firstly, we've not included vague categories like Action or Adventure. Secondly, each game is limited to one primary type. If a game spans a few types, we'll use the closest one.

For example, here are the eShop genres for a few puzzle games:

  • Mini Metro - Arcade , Education , Puzzle , Simulation
  • ACA NeoGeo Magical Drop III - Arcade , Puzzle
  • Picross S3 - Puzzle , Strategy
  • ACA NeoGeo Puzzle Bobble 2 - Action , Arcade , Puzzle
  • Piczle Lines DX 500 More Puzzles - Puzzle , Training

With primary types, all of the above games have a primary type of "Puzzle", which we think is a bit simpler.

You can see a list of all primary types on our Browse by type page.

Tags (subcategories)

Tags are used for more specific categorisation. Unlike primary types, you can have multiple tags for each game. Genres are similar as you can also have multiple per game. However, the key difference is that we're using tags to be quite granular, whereas genres tend to be fairly broad.

For instance, within the Puzzle primary type, we have tags for Mahjong and Picross. You can see the games here:

In these examples, tags behave more like subcategories. And in fact, most of the uses of tags work in much the same way. The one exception is where we have special tags for games that aren't of a specific type. Such as:

You can see a list of all our tags on the Browse by tag page.

Series

This is a special grouping that allows us to games with a common character (Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Mega Man) or from a branded series of releases (ACA NeoGeo, Arcade Archives, Sega Ages, Johnny Turbo's Arcade). Most games don't have a series, but where they do, we've grouped them together here.

You can see a list of all the game series on the Browse by series page.

Feedback needed!

It's very likely that we'll rename / reposition Primary types and Tags to be Categories and Subcategories, respectively. The names are clearer for one thing, and it reduces the overlap where a tag is probably just a subcategory.

Beyond that, we'd like your feedback on a couple of things:

  1. Does the list of categories / primary types look good? Would you add or change any of the categories listed? See here.
  2. Are there any notable games missing from these pages that have not been categorised yet?

With your help, we hope to provide better categorisation and make it easier to find games you might not know about.

Thanks for reading!

Published: 16th Feb 2020 10:38