Feature Request: Overhaul of the box front system (organising covers from different launchers).

Currently when it comes to organising front covers, Launchbox only has these types:

Box - Front
Box - Front - Reconstructed
Box - 3D
Fanart - Box - Front

This works fine for most older games that were released physically, as typically the only time you’d see a game on one platform with multiple different front covers was if the covers came from different regions (which Launchbox already takes care of).

However, nowadays it’s not uncommon for a single PC game to have multiple different box arts not just based on region, but also based on which launcher the game runs in. Twitch, Origin, Uplay, Epic, GoG Galaxy 2, and the new Steam library, all of these now use the familiar Vertical box art format most PC games use…and they all do it differently. Sometimes it’s only slight, such as being a different aspect ratio. However sometimes they use different designs between different launchers/services, and some games nowadays even regularly change their box art based on recent updates and events. Not only does this apply to contemporary games, but this can even apply to retro games with digital re-releases available through multiple services.

To keep up with this, I think it would be cool if some new image categories were introduced to make it easier to organise the multiple types of box art a game can have. For example:

Box - Steam
Box - GoG Galaxy
Box - Twitch
Box - Epic
etc

There are a couple of benefits to this, one being that it would make uploading and organising images on the Launchbox database less confusing. There have been a couple of occasions where i’ve uploaded official Twitch box art to the database as “Box - Front”, only for someone else to come along and erroneously change it to “Fanart - Box”. Being able to label such images as “Box - Twitch” could help avoid such confusion.

These new image categories could also prove useful for Launchbox Premium users, who have the option of changing the Box Front Priorities. They could set up their Box Front Priorities like so:

Box - Steam
Box - Front
Fanart - Box - Front

This way, to use my Quake collection from Steam as an example, my copies of Quake, Quake 2, and Quake 4 would use the available Steam box art, while my copies of Quake 3 and Quake 3 Team Arena, which currently don’t have Steam box art available, would instead use the original physical box art. Any other game lacking box art would then use fanart boxes.

On a similar note, it would also be nice if Launchbox could automatically download the new Vertical box art for Steam games like it already does with the “Steam Banner” image type. This is currently possible using the Steam Scraper plugin, but this also downloads and replaces all the metadata of the game along with the images, which can be a bit annoying if you prefer the metadata from the Launchbox database.

So yeah, that’s my feature suggestion. Thank you for reading. Also, I wasn’t sure whether this should be tagged as “enhancement” or “proposal”, so I apologise if I picked the wrong one.

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