Year of release for a game is an issue here at GOG, that annoys many of us.

For some unknown reason or flawed thinking, GOG sometimes use the wrong date (year).

To my mind, and agreed with by many others, the only true release date, is the year a game was first released, not it's re-release date or the year of enhancement etc. The only time it should change, is for a remake. If GOG want to include those other dates, they should either do so in a separate field for such, or put that date in brackets in the usual field.

If you are looking for a game in your library from the year 1996 for instance, then it doesn't help if a game has the year it was released at GOG, that makes no sense. Neither does the year of re-release or because it has been remastered or enhanced. The game is still a product of the year it was originally released, modifications aside.

Anyway, some staff at GOG do it right, others don't ... or maybe the game provider is at fault.

I have gotten fed up with this, especially as I require to know what year for my structured backups of offline installers.

If I had been savvy enough, then I would have kept a record of the year for each game as I bought it, obtained from somewhere like PCGaming Wiki. Alas I did not do so, and my backup regime has changed now to where Year is important.

In basic terms, I have a folder called GoG Classics for all games before 2002 (currently) and another called GoG Extras, for all games after 2017 (currently). You can see them as Older and Recent folders, and the rest of my games are stored in alphanumeric folders in a folder called GoG, unless they are GoG Freebies or GoG Demos or related to such, GoG Mate. I also have GoG Linux, GoG Videos and GoG Movies folders. GoG Extras is a bit like an overflow folder for newest releases. This is so I can more easily spread them over several backup drives.

Being a hobby programmer or coder, I decided to craft my own solution to this, as having to manually go to PCGaming Wiki to check year for all of my many games, is just too painful.

I have been testing my program, GetGameYear, and improving it for a while, and while testing is ongoing, I have decided it works well enough to share. Windows only I am afraid. It uses both PCGaming Wiki and Wikidata.

INFORMATION & SCREENSHOTS - https://github.com/Twombs/GetGameYear

DOWNLOAD - https://github.com/Twombs/GetGameYear/releases/tag/v1.6

Enjoy!

NOTE - This requires full game title not the lowercase dash separated slug.

Alas, after much usage now, I cannot recommend relying on the year returned by Wikidata.

When you do get a return from Wikidata, that involves a usable URL for PCGaming Wiki, I recommend you use that to then get the true year. Double download I know, but at this stage it cannot be helped, as I am yet to work out how to get the correct year back from Wikidata, or if you even can.

To avoid the double download as much as possible, I would recommend you just use PCGaming Wiki as the default, and where that fails in regard to a correct URL, then use Wikidata to hopefully get that. Of course this likely means three downloads, but you may often get away with just one download of data in the huge majority of cases.

The real problem with using PCGaming Wiki, and why I changed to giving Wikidata as an option and the new default, is because the URL text for a game title can be all over the shop. Often I have found a URL doesn't work, because one of the words in the game title is in the incorrect case as per listing at PCGaming Wiki. While my program tries variations of dash or colon, sometimes there are other factors at play too, especially where a game does or doesn't have a secondary part to its title or is listed as part of a collection and doesn't have its own web page at PCGaming Wiki.

Getting the year has turned out to be quite a tricky business in many cases, often requiring manual interaction. So my apologies about the title of this thread etc, if you thought I was kind of guaranteeing an easy solution ... there doesn't appear to be one at this point. Still as odds go, you are better off time wise, using my program, as mostly it will work well and quickly for you.

P.S. In my next update, I may remove Wikidata as an option altogether, but still have it do a silent second query where needed to just get the correct PCGaming Wiki URL, to then use that to get the year.

I've been working away now and then, making improvements to my Get Game Year program, and having returned to just getting the year from PCGaming Wiki, it would be nice to know they can be trusted to have the year right.

The problem with getting the year of any game, is that you first have to be using the correct title, and there are lots of reasons why that isn't as straightforward as you might think, and PCGaming Wiki has next to no flexibility when it comes to URL, and only a bit more when it comes to a manual search with their input field.

My latest test, proved to be problematic to say the least.
First off I got no return from PCGaming Wiki for Samorost, using - https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Samorost

A manual search with their input field, returned three Samorost entries.

Samorost 1
Samorost 2
Samorost 3

Now obviously Samorost 1 is what I want. So no biggie in that regard.
Except that the year returned is 2021.

This is despite the listings for games 2 and 3, being 2005 and 2016 respectively. Now I am aware that Samorost finally got a store release in 2021, though it had been available for free from the developer's website for many a year.

Surely the release date should be that of when it was first made available to the public?

The game was originally titled without a number, so just Samorost and not Samorost 1.
At the very least there should be some comment about all this at PCGaming Wiki, and in my view a listing for just Samorost and the date it was first released for availability to the public.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samorost

As you can see from Wikipedia, the game was first released in 2003, with a Remaster released in 2021.

Wikidata was also no help in this regard, as it also failed to recognize just Samorost, so no PCGaming Wiki URL via Wikidata was forthcoming.

Perhaps I now need to throw a query to Wikipedia into my program, as yet another option, though many games do not have a web page at Wikipedia. Still, as a last ditch effort it might be useful sometimes.

This whole thing is sometimes proving to be trickier than I thought.
And Jeez, don't I wish GOG just provided the correct year in the first place, and saved me all this fuss.

P.S. And to be perfectly honest about the game in question, why the hell was it just called Samorost 1 and not Samorost (Remaster) or similar? And unless GOG later renamed the game, my download backup folder for the GOG release is just called Samorost.

Yeah, this is probably not something that will be able to do flawlessly without human oversight.

BTW, my usual M.O. for the cases when I really want to be as sure as possible when a game was released is to check both Wikipedia and MobyGames. (On MobyGames, remasters, enhanced editions and such often have their own entries, separate from the originals, so it can sometimes make getting to the bottom of things a little easier. But at the end of the day, it still uses user-sourced data.)

Yep, and really I am just trying to make that requirement as minimal as possible.

I should probably check out MobyGames, it's been a long while since I visited there.

As you can imagine, with over 1600 games at GOG now, it takes a while to process them all and get the year for each, and some folk here have many more than that. So mostly automation is the preferred process, and most of the time now it is enough. So more than anything I am just fine tuning now.

That said, issues like with Samorost do pop up, and I also know my records have a few wrong years that need correcting. Add to that the fact I don't want the year of a remaster, and it all gets kind of messy. If I recognize that has happened, then I can do something about it. The problem is not always knowing when that is indeed the case.