Remove Region Assignment for Fanart Images

📋Summary

Fanart is typically non-regional artwork created by fans or contributors to enhance a game’s presentation. Unlike official media such as box art or logos, fanart isn’t tied to any specific release or platform region and is meant to represent the game in a general or stylized way.

❗Problem

Currently, all media types in the LaunchBox Games Database — including fanart — require a region to be assigned. This causes several issues:

• Fanart is often incorrectly associated with regions where the game was never released.

• LaunchBox’s scraping logic prioritizes region-specific matches, leading to skipped or miscategorized fanart.

• There’s no clear guidance on what region a piece of fanart should represent — style, release region, or language?

These factors create confusion for users and hinder the download of high-quality fanart.

💡Proposal

• Remove the requirement to assign a region to fanart images in the Games Database.

• Create a universal, regionless category for fanart.

• Update scraping logic to treat fanart as global and not filter it based on region.

• (Optional) Migrate or clean up existing fanart entries that have been incorrectly tagged with regional data.

✅Benefits

• Simplifies database contribution and maintenance for fanart.

• Prevents good-quality fanart from being skipped due to mismatched regions.

• Removes ambiguity around regional tagging of community-created artwork.

• Enhances consistency and availability of visual media across all games.

Removing regional metadata from fanart would improve both the submission process and end-user experience.