[IRONY MODE ON]

How marvelous, so now the top men are back! As the SOON promises!

[IRONY MODE OFF]

This looks like its going into the right direction, but also like GOG won't fix these things soon, which is a bit unfortunate. Reading the feedback, I think it becomes clear that taking features away (or making them less good) seems to hurt customers more than adding new features seems to please them.

I would vote for doing the fixes (repairing functionality that was lost in the last update) as soon as possible. That really should have a very high priority, if not the highest.

This might hint to another important point. Why only communicating with the community after the change, why not already before? Presenting planned changes and gathering feedback already during the design phase could have prevented some of these developments or changed them and that might have resulted in a better GOG website already much earlier at very moderate costs.

Just an idea: Let the design team present their ideas regularly in front of the community gathering feedback from the community.


SOON in GOG time means about 6 months, I think.

6 months? You are an optimistic.
And I was being ironic.

Thank you for that message. It dispels a lot of doubts :)

.. and hopes.

Great to hear from the GOG team addressing the issues and explaining their reasoning. Better late than never.

From my humble professional experience: this is something that sounds good in theory but would probably backfire. Having too many cooks in the kitchen is the best way to make sure nothing ever gets finished.

(Skipping the preamble)

1) S'cool. None of the staff are robots aside from the crawlers and data trackers, and even then you need time to process things.

2) Honestly, I don't care if the website looks like the Commidore 64 Quantum Link service as long as I can buy games and read forum posts.

3) Indeed, a hearty thanks.

4) As expected.

5) My single question on the overall design: Why the autoplay thumbnails?

6) On the lack of GOGmixes, I'll be most blunt: Many of them were poorly self-curated in the first place, reading more as "Uncle Oric's widget list of overtly specific criteria." Even the BOG mix didn't specify largely on why many of the games were allegedly bad.

7) GOOD RIDDANCE. I'm glad there's finally official word, and that word is, "Stop using IE11." (Hopefully those words won't have to be emblazoned in a big banner on the front page.)

8) Filters aren't easy. There's a few thousands of ways to do them, and you need to filter though the filters.

9) I think the most popular suggestion is to just float it to where the curated collections are.

Presumably, it wouldn't be so much a "nitpick over every single detail" but more a "Here's proposal A, B, and C, which do you prefer"?

Like I said, it sounds great. But you must be very careful or you will get "Why is GOG treating people who prefer option B as second-class citizens only because the vocal minority pushed for option A?"

I might be biased for the horrible organizational chart at my company. I had to cut gathering feedback for some projects at work because, even if I left everything open to very easily change it to another option, people would bitterly complain I hadn't made theirs default. And let's not start talking about deadlines... :/

Then they know we preferred the old layout better, right? I'm sure we don't mind them modernizing it but overall it was just plain easier to get around on it, and personally I hate the giant banner at the top. The big banner is just overpowering to 30 inch 1080p monitors. It fills the screen and it's like holy moly where's the store. I think the only thing bigger and flashier is London's giant advertisement screen in Piccadilly.

My dad, an engineer and programmer, told me some useful advice about programming a long time ago; keep it simple, and don't fix what isn't broken. I feel some of the changes do exactly the opposite of this, particularly reviews and the news.

I just hope they don't remove the search workarounds we've been using so we can still search by year released. It's hard to tell what's a 90s game and what's not by their GOG store box cover.


If it's an optimized backend you mean, by all means, but the front end is hugely user unfriendly and tbh most of it needs to be rolled back and removed features added back in. Like review paragraphs and weekly/weekend sale flash cards added at the top. It's really not best for anyone the way anything is.

I'm just as glad I don't have to constantly see a certain very prolific gogmix everywhere on the old 90s american games anymore, but I'd like to see a feature that's like a wishlist only it's "X User's list of recommended games" with their reviews attached or something about why they liked those games.

Oh please bring back year released and "sort in order of price/discounted price" at least because sometimes I have a budget and I don't want to have to go through the whole tier of under 20 games in order to find something between 10 and 15. I'd like the pricing to be all neatly in order from least to most and vice versa.

How about they replace the giant banner promo with the news? Giant banner news! That would be perfect. Nobody would miss new releases or sales ever then. It would be more useful than the five featured programs that don't change for ages. There's such a thing as oversaturation of advertisement where it puts people off from the product completely. I wanted Stellaris before this but I'm so tired of seeing it.

Thank you very much for responding back.

It's not just his issue. While the review system is definitely the nice, the character limitation and formatting is problematic. It's only a small thing but it would go a decent way and can probably be fixed rather quickly.

Will we be able to see game titles without hovering over them? It's really bothersome to have to do it for every (ugly) tile and currently impossible because I absolutely don't want any videos to be played. Like I said somewhere, the screenshots showing upon hovering is a quirky little thing but the game titles have to be shown at all times.

Good, communication is the most important aspect of any kind of relationship. I'm often surprised how frequently this is disregarded.

It's not just discoverability, it also provided good information about games more often than not. A feature to replace that would be appreciated.

It's not just old browser versions though. You gated not only those but also the Firefox ESR one which was one month "old" at the time of the redesign, then all the current forks which are up-to-date but don't support the Quantum stuff as well as IE 11 which is used by 10% of the desktop users. Sure, most of those sit in Asia but considering you want to cater to the Chinese (and ideally the Koreans as the, maybe even more, important group), it doesn't make sense to just drop it, especially because you won't even be able to guide them towards downloading your client as they will leave as soon as they see the mess of a front page.
Also, please explain...how is it "impossible" to keep support for them? You changed your design the way that excludes them but got absolutely nothing in return, except anger from the community because the redesign is that bad. It doesn't make any sense at all, especially for a business which would want to catch as many users as possible. If you look around the web, somehow, ever single store works fine, except for GOG. Shouldn't that strike you as odd, like, really really odd? And do you really think people will change their browsers just because of GOG? That is highly unlikely. They will either not bother at all, or just use the forum (like me) instead and catch what releases/news they catch and miss whatever they miss. Honestly, to me it seems like you did a bunch of (not good) work and now don't want to ditch it because it would be a lot of wasted money/time.
(Also, there may be issues with either Opera or Safari, at least it was mentioned in one of the many threads.)

Please don't forget turning "Windows" into different versions again and also bringing time frames back. Currently, it's impossible to find anything not specific. (Also, some additional categories would be nice...like Jump'n'Run for Earthworm Jim and the like.)

The community would not be part of the cooking process, merely an audience you can throw ideas to and get some feedback that you then can choose to listen to or not. No shared decision power, just getting feedback earlier.

It might fail, but I've seen it already in action and it worked there. It could even save money and time (by not needing to do stuff that nobody likes anyway). Basically, whenever the community opposes something strongly, one should think twice and then once again about it.

The idea is basically that a person from GOG could present an area that they want to work on, clearly formulate the problem they want to solve and how they want to solve it. The community could then give feedback on the problem (is it really worth it) and the solution, including proposing alternatives, or suggesting improvements. Then GOG would do want they think best including the advice from the community that they got.

Just as an example:

GOG: We would like to reduce the number of filters in the game search.
Community: Very strong no, please don't do that.
GOG: Okay, it seems to be important, we will try to keep the number of filters and maybe add new ones. Which ones would you like to have most...
Community: ....

Can't disagree with that.

Some kind of "developer's diary" like some game developers are posting now in their forums? If it is presented as a specific problem to solve and a proposed solution it could work. Just make clear that feedback != purchase order.