Yes I agree. And my shooters are a big mess too, lol. The first problem is consistency. You'll have shooters, FPS, First Person Shooter, First-Person Shooter, Shooter / First Person. But the second problem is the user can't really edit this data in a sane way (and i think they should be able to customize all their genres and revert to a default that is consistent if they change their mind down the road)
The cause of this problem seems to be that different platforms have different Genre declaration methods because they were sourced differently? For mine I have different styles of genres for Windows/steam, wikipedia, Arcade/MAME, the launchbox DB, and some odd things I cleaned up from Atari 800. I have stupid things too for arcade games like 'climbing / building" and "whac-a-mole / puzzle" i cleaned those up though (I think that's some kind of MAME database but i'm unsure how i went about it)
It would be great like so great if you could just right click the Genre and say "Rename" like you can with a platform when you list by platforms. Same with developers (those are a mess as well. Do we need 20+ derivatives of Midway?) Maybe thats feasible? it seems to be the most intuitive approach.
Someone had made a bulk editor for genres at one point, but perhaps there would be a bit of an search editor which could more smartly (and safely) search any field replacing something with something else?
This could be helpful, For example:
Change [Platform] "NES" to "Nintendo Entertainment System" (Renaming platforms causes probably EVERY user grief at some point when they discover you can't just do that! Heck, I know the drill by now and I still sometimes forget how to update it after i rename something in LaunchBox, so might as well make a more straightforward and easier way of renaming everything?)
Change [Genre] "Shooter" to "Shooter / First Person" and also give it the ability to preserve secondary [Genre] Tags by only targeting and isolating the first. And someday you might change your mind and want to lump them all into "FPS" so why not have a tool that lets you do it?
A tool like this would be great because it would allow a user to download metadata then rearrange it as they saw fit if they wanted. or change things down the road (Lets just rename all those Tactical FPS and regular FPS and open world FPS to "FPS")
And if the user decides they dont like that decision maybe an option to revert ot default meta data for the same isolated search results of FPS?
I'd spend the time to do it manually and load up an XML into editpadpro but currently the genre info is stored in each and every platform so you'd have to go through each one. or do it internally. Neither are really viable. that'd be a chore. I still might do it, focusing on the more bigger ones like Flight simulators and things that just annoy me the most.