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A question was recently asked to identify a game bundle in a game CD but lacks a media or screenshot of the game CD or game bundle itself. I've voted to close it but it was left open in the Close votes review queue.

Quoting Identify bundle containing PC remakes of several Sega-related titles (emphasis mine):

Around the year 2012 I got a CD called "Clone Games CD" in Brazil, which is a bundle of games. It included several games packaged as Windows executables and an AutoPlay launcher for browing and launching the games, which seem to be remakes and emulations of classic games released to Sega. I recall it includes titles such as […]

I'd like to know if anyone happens to know the origin of the "game bundle" software used by this CD. I've picture of one of the games included by this bundle, but I don't have a picture of the CD or bundle software itself.

This question, I believe, is off-topic because:

  1. It is not a game ID question, but rather a game CD / game bundle ID question, which I don't recall as being on-topic on this site. We don't even have a tag for it. All of the on-topic identification questions that we allow here have respective tags. The OP is looking for the bundle or game CD that the games are on, not the games themselves. This is not an on-topic question.

  2. It is requesting identification based on a description of what the OP can recall from memory. It lacks any media or screenshots of the bundle software / autoplay launcher, or the game CD itself. It only contains screenshots of the games in the bundle, which have already been identified and are not what the OP is looking for. Other potential answerers will be unable to identify the game CD / game bundle based on the media provided. Only the OP can determine whether a given answer is correct.

According to our game identification policy - What are the requirements for asking a game identification question:

Game identification questions based only on the asker's description of a game are off topic...

If you include a screenshot, audio file, or other tangible media from the game itself then we make an exception and your question is on topic. The reasoning for this exception is outlined here and here. Note that there needs to be reasonable proof that your artifact is actually from a game, more so that just you think it could be.

The images included are not screenshots of the bundle software / autoplay launcher or the CD itself, which would allow others to identify the bundle/CD, but rather screenshots of individual games in the bundle, which aren't what OP is looking to identify.

According to the same meta post above:

Clarification: This distinction is based primarily on use case.

  • We support the use case where someone sees or hears a thing that is clearly from a video game, and wants to identify more concretely what video game it's from.
  • We do not support the use case where someone remembers something about a game and wants to identify what game it was.

Editing questions from the latter category to include an artifact from the game does not remove them from that category, and questions of that nature should still be closed and deleted as per the normal process.

I believe the question falls under the latter, off-topic category. OP remembered something about a game CD / game bundle, and as a workaround to our policy requiring media from the game itself, included images of the (already identified) games included with the bundle.

Allowing the question could lead to other users asking game CD/bundle ID questions describing them from memory and simply adding googled images of games inside said bundle as a workaround/loophole to our "must include media from the game itself" requirement. This is problematic for the reasons stated in the linked meta posts above, and it does not follow the spirit (intent) of Arqade policy regarding game ID questions.

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I feel like the question this meta is about is very hard to answer. All we know is a particular game that was maybe in the bundle. Even if they included screenshots of that game, it doesn't really matter for their main question. The best one could do is try research potential bundles that the game included in the post was apart of.

This is probably one of those cases where we should close the question for not having any artifact of the bundle. Even though the game that they included screenshots for may have been in said bundle, it's not the bundle itself. As you said, it's a workaround to satisfying the game identification question criteria.

I can see the OP saying "if I had a picture of the bundle I wouldn't need to ask my question", which may be true, but I really don't see any way for this kind of question to be on-topic/work on our site.

Bottom-line, it essentially boils down to a game identification question without any artifact of the actual thing they want identified.

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Coming from a country where game and software piracy was quite rampant, I believe the problem is with the various unlicensed bundles, regardless of their artifact.

When identifying a game, whether it's modded/ROM-hacked or not, it's still identifying a specific game. This is in contrast to identifying bundles, whereas unless the bundle is official (in which it may already be recorded on game databases and make the searching more trivial), there are also possibilities of unlicensed bundles (such as N-in-1 CD bundles), and it also depends on the location where it's sold/made, which makes the question "too localized" (borrowing from the old close reason).

Thus, I see such questions as infeasible to be answered objectively.

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Part of the problem is that it's reasonable to expect someone to have media of a game, and less reasonable to expect someone to have media of a game bundle. (I don't know about the rest of you, but in the late 90s I was not in the habit of taking photos of CDs I had in my possession. Not only because that would be a weird thing to do, but because cell phones with cameras were not as ubiquitous as they are today. Actually, come to think of it, I didn't actually have a cell phone at the time, so if I did take a photo of a random CD it would've been with a film camera.)

I think that if we do disqualify questions of this nature, it'll need to be for a reason that is distinct from the "media for identifying a game" policy.

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