Need a one stop source for video game box art.

April 12, 2012 8:12 AM

What's the best way to get video game cover art in an automated fashion?

I have a site that has mostly user generated content. Users can create entries for existing games, then others add to that entry.

One thing I'd really like to add is box cover art for each game, but haven't really been able to find a good source for how to do this outside of manually looking for images for each game.

Anyone have a suggestion for an API out there that could potentially return covers based on a name match that I could then write something around to grab/use that image?

posted by nerhael to computers & internet (6 answers total)

Don't have an exact answer, but there are iphone apps that get box art based on upc code, so there has to be a way to do it.
posted by empath at 8:19 AM on April 12, 2012

I've seen sites that use Amazon product images for this, largely because of their huge selection and the fact that they store multiple image sizes.

For example, this is the default cover image for Valkyria Chronicles. Replace the "300" at the end of the URL with "500" and you get this.
posted by Oktober at 8:20 AM on April 12, 2012

Amazon has an api that can return images.
posted by empath at 8:23 AM on April 12, 2012

For new games, I'd try Amazon first. For older games I'd try MobyGames. It's just a full text search, but their database of names is good and clean enough you'd probably get good results, then you'd just scrape out the HTML. I have no idea how MobyGames would feel about you doing that, nor the copyright status of the images.
posted by Nelson at 8:36 AM on April 12, 2012

Giant Bomb has an API you can call, I think this is as close as you're going to get to a one stop resource. Looking at their docs it seems like it should be an easy job to build something to grab covers. Unless you're doing pretty obscure titles I'd say you can most likely find what you're looking for.
posted by tracert at 5:26 PM on April 12, 2012

You already said it's user generated. Why not have the users upload it? Offer some bobble or points and they will do it when the create the entry. Just look at videogame/boardgame/rpggeek.com
posted by Winnemac at 6:02 PM on April 12, 2012