As it stands, there is a lot of confusion and mixed up data between Collections and Franchises, all relating to the series in which a game belongs. Some games will be within a collection without a franchise, while other series titles such as "Legend of Zelda" has 2 different database ID's for its collection and its franchise.

Because of these differences, it's hard to utilise the series distinction in searches, as it might be in one category or the other, or both. If both are merged, there would be a more consistent way of determining a "series", with many games being a part of multiple "series".

I've been looking at how to get a card game that is currently being streamed on twitch by a few people listed in IGDB so that twitch will have it listed as a game.

Currently people are just streaming it under the Magic the Gathering label because you have to pick something and that is card-gamey. But whilst MTG is the largest card game, many other games are seeing success online in various forms.

Whilst pokemon and MTG command the limelight in terms of box openings etc.
There are plenty of people playing other card games virtually over webcam or TTS and streaming them and it seems like there should be an easy way to indicate which one you are playing on twitch.

Otherwise can there be a clear path for how to add these games onto Twitch so people can find us streaming them?

I feel like there should be a general category for certain series. Such as Zelda, Mario, Megaman, RE, Digimon all under one catergory instead of individual games(unless they are a new). IGDB already implements this under what they call "Collections."

What do you think? People who play older titles but are a part of said series' community would be more in their line of audience. It's better than having them spread out in random places like Retro or Just Chatting. So instead of having massive communities around certain games, whether they are thriving or dying, you can have a continuous community around a certain series.

Currently keywords are just a dumping ground for any word or phrase that is somewhat related to a game.

Perhaps what is needed is a re-definition or splitting up of keywords into:

Game mechanics (keywords)
Atmospheric/visual (keywords)
Player character (keywords)
Other/Minor (keywords)

Let's take the "rain" keyword for example. Currently there are 310 games with this keyword assigned. These games feature rain to various degrees for various purposes:

Gameplay: Rain (Game) - a core mechanic where your character is invisible unless they stand in the rain.
Atmospheric: Deadly Premonition - it rains for most of the game, and the raincoat killer only kills when it is raining. The storyline and atmosphere are driven by the rain.
Character: Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 - Rain is the name of a playable character.
Other/Minor: GTA Vice City - it features rain in terms of a weather cycle but it is not a core gameplay mechnic, nor used as an atmospheric/story related tool.

Why the current set-up is a problem:

Example 1: I am a user who liked the rain mechanic in Rain so I check the keyword to see other games that use it as a mechanic: to be given a list of 310 games such as Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection, Wario Land 3, God of War, Donkey Kong Country. Most games are irrelevant to me.

Example 2: I am a user who enjoyed the way that rain was used in Deadly Premonition as an atmospheric and story telling device and again I'm given the above list of games.

Currently the games associated with a keyword are overloaded to the point that they are not useful to a user

So essentially, keywords becomes a pot of everything and anything related to a game with no way to distinguish WHAT about a game it refers to. This ambiguosness reduces the ability for these keyword tags to mean anything or be helpful to users.

I understand that is difficult to alter the way keywords are assigned/used but as an idea, during a transitionary period, the current "keyword" attribute and its contents for each game could simply become "Other/Minor Keywords" (so they still exist and are useable, searchable etc.) but at the same time the new keywords attributes (game mechanics, atmospheric, player character etc.) can be added and users encouraged to build them up.