Why does the emulator exclude the last 2 characters of Game ID in various places?

[Franpa]

FF: CC: My Life as a King for example has a Game ID of WFCEGD yet the title bar when playing the game displays WFCE and when Exporting Saves the folder containing data for that game is also called WFCE... the game Library correctly shows the full Game ID when I enable the column for it and it's correctly shown in the titlebar when viewing the Properties of the game.

Why the discrepancy?

[JosJuice]

Whether a game ID consists of 4 or 6 characters is a matter of definition. Nintendo always uses 4, which is why the exported save data only uses 4. (Dolphin exports to the same format as the Wii Menu does.) Dolphin traditionally always used 6, but online databases like GameTDB.com typically use 6 for disc-based games and 4 for downloadable games. I think the reason why the title bar shows 4 characters is to help match things up with the list of game names from GameTDB.com which Dolphin uses in various places including the title bar.

[Kolano]

Those final 2 characters indicate the games publisher...
https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=GameIDs

The first 4 are sufficient to uniquely identify things, so they are sometimes omitted. I think there are also some particularities around how the values are stored between disc images and downloads that result in these discrepancies.

[Franpa]

Thank you.

[JosJuice]

Those final 2 characters indicate the games publisher...
https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=GameIDs

The first 4 are sufficient to uniquely identify things, so they are sometimes omitted. I think there are also some particularities around how the values are stored between disc images and downloads that result in these discrepancies.

On discs the publisher ID is stored immediately after the 4-character game ID, which I guess resulted in people assuming that the two are one combined ID. In downloaded titles they're not stored adjacently.