The title.
I've realized recently that spin-off games have their own topic in the video game forums. We had a topic just for Mario Kart 7. Aka, just one game.
But why do we need a topic for one game that is part of the Mario Series when we have a Mario topic? Just because it's a spinoff? With the spinoff idea, Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World should have its own topic. And Fortune Street. And Poképark. And My Pokémon Ranch. And so on.
Shouldn't topics be merged together to save more space? What is the point in spin-offs having their own topic?

Perhaps we should have a topic for Mario games and a topic for Mario Kart games. Would that work?


And Wario and Yoshi topics should be merged with Mario topic.

I was thinking more amongst the lines of even Mario Kart being merged.
And yeah, I think Wario and Yoshi should be merged. They are such small 'franchises' that they are more of spin-offs.

Although Donkey Kong should stay outside.

oh my god you people

Why is saving space a problem? Seriously, f***

Why can't I make a thread about YOSHI'S ISLAND without people talking about New Super Mario Bros?

Stop

I'll agree with this. Even though Donkey Kong does kind of push it, he does pretty much have his own franchise.

Edit: okay maybe it's not all games but having individual topics for games that belong in another category should prolly be in that category.

There already was a Mario Kart topic.

I originally opened the [MP] Super Mario topic to be only about the, then, recently announced New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Super Mario Galaxy 2. Someone suggested me to change it to a general Mario topic, I denied it at first, as my main focus for the topic was about those two games only, but indeed, the lack of a general Mario topic made me change my mind, and became the Mario's Games Discussion Topic focusing everything about Mario games and its spin-offs. When Geno's general cleanup came along, he renamed the topic as it is currently called, and that change, along with the creation of a Mario Kart topic, made me realize that topic got to be only about the main Super Mario platform games, with the spin-offs getting discussed on a different topic, therefore, spin-offs topics are actually needed, so they don't mix up with the mainstream series.

or

we could just make threads to discuss games we're interested in discussing

Merging topics together to discuss various series, spin-offs or otherwise is going to be incredibly messy. Say I were to make a topic about my love of kitchens. Now there are various things that can be discussed, utensils, recipes, foods, appliances, etc. If someone were to suddenly step into my topic talking about bathrooms, and their love of bathtubs, etc, it'd be completely off topic. They may be related in regard to them both being locations within a house, but that by no means makes them similar enough to bring both topics together simply because they are related. The purpose of the thread was kitchens, not bathrooms.

The same can be said about spin-offs, especially series such as Yoshi, and Wario. If one is talking about a Mario game, they do not expect to suddenly find themselves in a discussion talking about a Wario game. While I can understand the attempt of saving space or whatever, but it is in the long scope of things inefficient and unnecessarily clustered.

The only time I could see the need to merge topics together would be in the event that there was a Mario Party topic, and then a Mario Party 2 topic, and so on and so forth. Those are truly all of the same series and could be simply all discussed within one topic as the games are more than closely related, they are in fact sequels.

Discussion ended, I will leave this up to moderators of the section if they feel like it's a problem. The section has already gone through a lot of organizational changes so I don't think we need to go this far