Companies

This category needs a complete overhaul. It was a good idea back in early 2010 but these days it's getting a bit confusing.

The way I originally saw it was

• "Companies" - companies which worked directly with Sega, so Ancient for making Sonic Game Gear games, Zilog for making the chips within Sega consoles, etc.
• "Development Companies" - companies within Sega - AM1, AM2, AM3, etc.
• "Third-Party Development Companies" - companies which built games for Sega consoles. So Iguana Entertainment who built games for Acclaim, etc.
• "Unlicensed Development Companies" - companies that made things without a license

Don't know where "Independent Development Companies" came from. Don't know where third-party publishers fit into the equation either. Or accessory manufacturers (Mad Catz). Or distributors (Blaze Europe). Or development teams within third party companies.

I'm thinking maybe go back to basics and have a "PUBLISHERS" and "DEVELOPERS" categories. If they publish, shove them in the former, if they develop, the latter. And then all the logos would be shoved into a category called "Company logos" or something. If it gets too big... split it up by region or something... idk. Keep the Sega stuff separate (and by Sega stuff, I mean, studios owned by the company or are directly tied to them). And maybe you could have DISTRIBUTORS and HARDWARE MANUFACTURERS as well.

In other news, I also don't really agree with redirecting things like "Sega AM7" to Overworks. I think in this case there should be two pages - one that covers games that were made under the AM7 banner, with another covering those under the Overworks one. We're Sega Retro - we can afford to make lots of pages of Sega studios past and present. It's not even called Overworks these days - it's Sega WOW, so we'd have AM1 and AM7 redirecting to the same place under this regime and that doesn't seem right to me.

This would also help when it came to producing a timetable of Sega's internal structure. Because it's changed dozens of times and we've not really been writing about it. Might I suggest something a bit like Tengen and Time Warner Interactive?

ALSO, company names. Some pages are known by their official names (i.e. they have "Ltd." or "Inc." in the title), most don't. Which is right? -Black Squirrel 12:17, 19 November 2011 (CST)

In order:

Yes, in fact I was going to suggest something similar and was thinking that when I added Record Labels. This was my suggestion:

Companies
  Software Developers
  Software Publishers — basically Third Party T-Series Codes
  Unlicensed Software Companies
  Record Labels
  Hardware Manufacturers
     Unlicensed Hardware Manufacturers (??)
Sega
  Software Teams
  Hardware Teams
  Regional Management/PR Companies (like Sega Europe)

Given how much overlap some of these have, there's no one true clean way to do it, but I guess the exceptions can be dealt with specifically.

I agree with you on the Sega AM7->Overworks thing, especially considering our listing of what each developer made is badly incomplete, but this is something I'm not knowledgeable with (and the Amusement Vision website lists almost nothing, for instance). I tried to do something like this with NEC (which is only half-done right now) and Victor (which is an even bigger mess than I first thought).

I don't think the Inc. thing is needed either - Andlabs 12:39, 19 November 2011 (CST)