Since I started this site nearly ten years ago, my video game collection has expanded by a considerable degree.
It wasn’t necessarily a deliberate choice like “I want to become a video game collector”, but it did come about at least partially through regret over past trade-ins of titles that have subsequently become inordinately expensive, such as the PS1 version of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
We have reached a point, however, where my living room is an actual “games library”, and my wife has started suggesting that I might want to get the complete collection insured. Before I could look into that, though, I needed to catalogue the damn thing via some means…
I’ve had a couple of abortive attempts at cataloguing the complete collection to date. On both occasions, I started with the best of intentions by using a Google Sheet so that I could update and refer back to the collection from anywhere, whether I was at home on my PC or out and about with only my phone.
But on both occasions, I became distracted from the process partway through and left the job half-finished. Then just to make matters more awkward, I picked up some games that I forgot to add into the spreadsheets, meaning that over time even the work I’d already done had become outdated. The first time that happened, I figured “ah, I’ll just start again and do it properly this time”. The second time, I decided to look into more specialised tools for making the job a bit easier.
After a bit of research, I settled on a service run by Collectorz.com, a seemingly well-established site that caters to collectors of movies, books, music, comics and video games. It’s not free — there’s a yearly subscription — but it is good, and I think it’s well worth the money. So I thought I’d tell you a bit about it today.
Each type of media supported by Collectorz.com can be tracked with two distinct components: a mobile app known as CLZ [Media] (CLZ Games in the case of what we’re concerned with today) and a web-based database front-end known as [Media] Connect (Game Connect in this instance). You can trial and subscribe to either of these individually, or get both together for a discounted price. At the time of writing, both will set you back £33.90 a year.
Now, before we go any further I’ll say that I’m not generally in love with the idea of Software as a Service, and was initially hesitant to splash the cash on this — particularly as it looks like Collectorz.com once offered a standalone “buy once and keep it” piece of desktop software.
But I thought about it a little and came to the conclusion that this is something that is worth paying for; I am, after all, using Collectorz.com’s servers to store my own database that tracks my collection and automatically populating that with regularly updated information from their database, and, in paying for the service, I’m helping to ensure that it remains available for the foreseeable future, as well as being ad-free. As they say, when something is “free”, you are not the customer; you are the product, usually for advertisers.
There’s also the fact that both CLZ Games and Game Connect are very good pieces of software that work well independently of one another, and can be synced nicely with each other to ensure your collection database is always up to date regardless of where you’re looking at it from.
The big attraction of CLZ Games for me was the fact that it includes a barcode scanner. This allows you to scan the UPC barcode from the back of a game or piece of hardware and automatically populate your collection database with information about the item in question. Out of 1,429 games scanned so far (and I’m not quite finished) there have only been a few that weren’t in the database at all, and a handful that had been miscategorised, usually with the wrong platform. It’s also interesting to spot when publishers have accidentally reused the same UPC for multiple products.
The database that the barcode scanner pulls from is surprisingly comprehensive, too, even including things like the Kickstarter backer-exclusive edition of Clannad I have — though not the Rance games, sadly. In the few instances where it can’t find a barcode, you’ll often find a title search in Collectorz.com’s online “Core” database will bring up the game in question — and in the even rarer cases that something isn’t there at all, you can submit details yourself. From the Web-based Game Connect you can also do things like automatically search Google Images for box art, saving you from photographing or scanning boxes yourself — I couldn’t find this option in CLZ Games, but it was simple enough to just update the game on the Web later.
For those who enjoy number-crunching, everything you add to your database is cross-referenced with PriceCharting.com, giving you a rough idea of how much each item is worth. Again, there’s very occasional errors — it believes my standard edition copy of Final Fantasy XVI is worth over £270 because the same barcode is seemingly used on the collector’s edition, for example — but for the most part it can be relied upon to provide at the very least a rough guide price for how much something is worth.
And yes, it’ll do things like automatically tot up the complete value of your collection, show you a breakdown of your collection by platform, genre, release year and suchlike — and you can even use the service to track the condition of your items and whether or not you’ve actually completed them.
Individual records include a nice spread of fields that will likely cover most things you’d want to track about your collection. A lot of this is filled out by default if you pull from the Core database using either the barcode scanner or title search, but you can also customise it to your own requirements.
There’s a Personal section that allows you to include information like the specific person a game belongs to if you’re using the software to track a shared collection, the physical location an individual item is stored in, and even the storage device a digital item is saved on if you’re tracking things in that much depth. (I’m sticking to the physical stuff for now.) There’s also a notes field, the ability to rate things between 0 and 10 stars, and custom tags that are independent of the genre tags drawn from the Core database.
There’s even a loan manager where you can track items that you’ve loaned out to other people, including the date they were loaned and the date you expect them back, plus a space for any notes you’ve made on the agreement. This is particularly useful for collectors who have especially rare items that they might want to offer up to journalists or YouTubers on a temporary basis, though I likely won’t use it much myself.
You can also organise things into separate discrete collections if you have the need to do so (I don’t) and bulk update items through “pick lists” that allow you to group items together via most of the fields in the database.
So far I’m yet to find a feature that I think I might need that isn’t already implemented in both CLZ Games and Game Connect, so I think this is absolutely the cataloguing solution I’ve been looking for. Now I just need to finish scanning the last few games that are missing from my database, and then figure out how to actually insure the damn collection… but that’s an adventure for another day, I feel!
In the meantime, I feel confident recommending Collectorz.com. If you’re hesitant to splash the cash, give the 7-day free trial a go, and if you think something else might suit you better after that, so be it. But I’ve found it absolutely ideal for my purposes, so I thought it was worth sharing!
Want more Pete? Check my personal blog I’m Not Doctor Who, and my YouTube channel ThisIsPete. If you enjoy what you read here, please consider buying me a coffee.
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