Hi Pinside!
TLDR;
Turns out grouping Premium and LE games together in one database record (which Pinside did from 2012 to 2018) was a bad decision. Today that we will start separating all of them into separate Premium and LE entries.
Backstory
Let's go back to the fall of 2011. Stern had just come out with Tron: Legacy and, a year earlier, Avatar and Rolling Stones. These titles were released in two different version of the game: a "pro" version (aimed at the operators market) and a "Limited Edition" (targeted toward the growing market of home buyers). Differences between the titles were slight, many just cosmetic, but enough to warrant me to create two database records: a Pro and an LE entry.
But then came Transformers and with it not two, but three different versions of the same title! Stern came up with another "Premium" model. Feature-wise, it was as rich as the LE, minus some hardware cosmetics (and the LE # tag). At the time, I figured it made little sense to generate yet another database entry, but instead decided to group together these very similar Premium and LE models. This was mostly decided due to the ratings (which I thought would be extremely similar) and, frankly, because I wasn't a fan of having to maintain yet another version.
Hindsight is 20/20
But as we all know now, Pro/Premium/LE (or variations hereof) became a standard and soon other manufacturers followed in Sterns footsteps by also releasing multiple version of the same title.
And after a few years, I became more and more convinced of the value of fully separating out these titles. So with the release of Deadpool, we began making different entries for all different versions of the game.
The problem challenge
That leaves us with old 15 titles that now need to be sliced in two (see list below). However, a huge amount of data has meanwhile accumulated for all these Premium/LE entries. Over 6,800 ads, 8,300+ ratings, 15,000 forum topics are linked to these games. Over 1,500 locations on our map are listing one of these games. Etc. And on top of that we have over 20,000 Pinsiders listing these games in their collections. So you can hopefully see that this separating is a bit of a daunting task.
Luckily a Pinsider offered to help. Damon (Damonator) reached out and asked about this and also offered his help, which made me come up with a strategy: We would rename all Premium/LE titles to Premium. Then we would clone that record into a new database entry for the LE. And then we would manually "point" certain content on the site to this new LE entry.
Affected titles
So... Which titles are we talking about anyways?
...done...
2691 Iron Maiden (Premium/LE) ✔ done
2146 Transformers (Premium/LE) - ✔ done - Game has simply been renamed to LE (there is no premium)
2144 AC/DC (Premium/LE) - ✔ done
2163 The Avengers (Premium/LE) - ✔ done
...to do...
2505 Guardians of the Galaxy (Premium/LE) - To do
2477 Star Wars (Premium/LE) - To do
2448 Aerosmith (Premium/LE) - To do
2431 Batman '66 - To do
2396 Ghostbusters (Premium/LE) - To do
2237 Game of Thrones (Premium/LE) - To do
2227 KISS (Premium/LE) - To do
2211 The Walking Dead (Premium/LE) - To do
2199 Mustang (Premium/LE) - To do
2191 Star Trek (Premium/LE) - To do
2188 Metallica (Premium/LE) - In progress: Game has been split into two entries
I'm hesitant about splitting LE's down into further separate entries. For example, The Avengers has a "normal" LE, but also a "Hulk" LE. Right now, these share one database record. I'm not sure if further separating these into two records adds much value?
In the coming weeks Damon and I will be working on this.
Is your collection affected? Once your game has been "split", you can go into the collection editor, click on the "purchase details" edit link for the affected game and change your game from Premium to LE or vice versa.