Looks like it's been monetise to maximise the revenue stream. Or in the other words, the redesign seems primarily focused on generating cash better than in meeting the user needs. That often happens when a free site becomes successful. I can't fault the owners for wanting to make more profit from their work, but usually such projects suffer as a result.

I'm surprised this didn't happen earlier. I assume GameFly is behind this, since they bought Mobygames a few years ago.

More often than not such services desperately need more money to cover maintenance costs. Considering the size of Moby Games' database I can barely imagine that they can cover all the costs through ad revenue.

Also I just took another look and I can't honestly say that there's a lot of ads on the new design. In fact I can see one (1!) caption that says advertisement and no ad is displayed for me there (and I'm not using an ad blocker or anything).

Quite so, servers and bandwidth aren't cheap, nor is support staff. It is entirely possible they were just breaking even, or losing money, before.

I don't think it's an increase in advertising they were going for, but rather a change designed to increase traffic, which then hopefully leads to more revenue. Changes like featuring contributors in the sidebar are intended to foster more social connection and drive more visits. Again, not necessarily a bad thing. Just saying that when design decisions are made for reasons other than "this is best usability approach" or "this is a valuable feature", it doesn't always end well.

Home of the Underdogs, The White?

Regardless of whether I like the new design or not, it's about time they did something. I'm pretty sure they'd been using the same basic HTML layout since the 1990s ;)

Check it out - mobygames.com in 1999 on archive.org

The problem currently is not ads themselves (yet), but the space that's reserved for them, which makes up an estimated 25% of the screen real estate. Even with no ads showing (yet), and just filling that space with irrelevant information or leaving it blank, that's a problem. Because the information from the previous, more efficient interface now doesn't fit the screen anymore. so you have to keep scrolling around. Even if you just want to use the navigation links.

Also, seriously, have you tried the "Game Browser"? Click, scroll, click, click, scroll, scroll .... even for entering a such a simple thing as a release year, you now have to scroll around, since they chose to hide the entries behind a collapsable field, which then expands to a long vertical list of entries which can't possibly fit on the screen. There's more than enough space if they had used several columns for the years, but they chose to give each year its own line, waste a lot of space in the right-hand part of the column, and on top of it use a huge font.

Whoever designed that needs a refresher course.

Having spent 5 minutes browsing the site just now, I have to say that I don't think the new design is all that bad. The new screenshot popup thingy seems to only function intermittently, but other than that, I think it's okay.

It's not bad but the older design was a little easier to navigate.

Like most site redesigns aimed for tablet users, this one has too much white space.

I'm holding my critisisms for now, as major redesigns take some time to get used to, my first impression is that it is looking somewhat better than the old layout though.
My biggest problem with MobyGames always have been that information given for each game is very limited and often more and better information about a game can be found on Wikipedia.
As for user reviews, mèèèèh.... (goat) =P

I kinda like it. But the old design did leave more information visible.

You can get something like the old screenshot view by clicking on 'View all'
http://www.mobygames.com/game/skool-daze/screenshots
*phew* had me worried for a moment there, or is that not what you meant?

That is what I meant. At least the information is there even if it's not on the popup screenshot viewer. Thanks for pointing that out.

I can't say I'm a huge fan of the new gallery system. It feels slow in comparision to the old gallery.