[quote name='FriskyTanuki']What do Bionic Commando, Missile Command, Command & Conquer, Commanders: Attack of the Genos, Pinball FX/Arcade, Wing Commander, Wolf of the Battlefield, TNT Racers, etc. have to do with sports? I also thought the Fire Pro Wrestling game wasn't out yet or may have even been cancelled at this point, but it counts if you have a time machine.[/QUOTE]
Here's how the list works. Pay very close attention, because I'll explain it once ...
ePrize, LLC is a very big Marketing agency. They do everything from Xbox Live Marketplace to casserole dinners, and whatever is between those 2 extremes. ePrize also knows how to run reward programs, so regardless if you're sending in UPC symbols or clicking on ads, they can count you!
ePrize also runs the Rewards program for Xbox Marketplace because once an ad campaign starts, Xbox folks won't touch it, because that ship has already sailed, and all attention is shifted to plan the next great ad campaign to pull in point-motivated gamers ... like the "Sales & Specials+" app (smirk!).
ePrize puts some junior DBA on the project. They're told "scrape everything that's been defined in the system", and don't spend time whether or not it's released, whether or not it costs points, or whether or not you get 100% of the items in your SQL query, as long as it's an effort ... but don't expect the junior DBA to know anything about games. So this person pulls all games in the
"Strategy and Simulation" group (because everyone knows "chess" is a sport, right?), and while doing so, also grabs the strategy games like "Command & Conquer".
But then this person, thinking they're helping gamers, says "uh oh, it grabbed 'Command & Conquer' which must be a sports game, so I'd better also grab anything with 'command' in it!", and so "Bionic Commando" gets sucked in.
And remember how I said ePrize knows as much about casseroles as they do Xbox Live? Well, how would a mega-corporation counting UPC symbols know what games are out there vs. what's coming in 2 weeks?
They don't.
So they let the junior DBA grab everything relevant from the list of titles, including games with 0 purchases, like "NBA Live 11". Nobody really cares that much, because it's impossible for you to
SPEND on it, and it's far more important they're all-inclusive rather than too-restrictive, otherwise you end up like those who didn't get credit for buying the Batman avatar suit from "The Dark Knight Rises", because it wasn't available at the start of July, and now their team has to do all that research to see who bought it to verify that they qualify for the measly 240pt reward ... so save money on labor, and just include as much as you can. And if a few extra get in like "Conflict: Denied Ops", then that's good for the gamers, nobody at ePrize has to spend countless hours researching games ... when they'd rather be at home making soup, or at a bar celebrating "Thursday", or gossiping about the Kardashians ... and everybody wins.
So I hope that explains a little bit about the world of large companies hiring specialized companies to do their "rewards" programs, even if the results are less than understandable.