After already having had a look at the
game page redesign, let's talk about the front page.
I think it's necessary to address the elephant in the room here first: I suppose someone put a lot of time into the redesigns in general and maybe even effort. Having your artistic baby shat on in public, after you've been looking forward to unleash it onto your customers, is not a great feeling. I get that. With that and the matter of personal insults in mind, it is important to note that I like this place, I want it to succeed for at least another ten years and in my opinion none of you guys are stupid.
The redesign, on the other hand, clearly is, though.
But lets have a look at it and I'll try not to rant, but instead point out the problems, so maybe we can work on this mess together.
So the point of the whole thing is to sell games. You want those sales, I want to know what to buy. We're kinda on the same page here. Now you have this button, titled "Store", where all of those juicy games are listed. That's what a store is, really, and I don't know about you, but from a consumer standpoint that actually works out rather well. Now the front page can be used for things that are not well reflected in the store: sales and newcommers. Up until now this actually worked out quite well. Just pasting some game on the front page for no discernable reason is obviously utter nonsense, but so far that had been kept to a tolerable minimum. In addition you had this nice box, that cycled through current sales (with an indicator of how much time was left - nice job on that one!) and the news blog (that didn't just consist of headlines, but also indicated a short blurb about what's going on) wasn't far off, either. I never understood, why you had this borderline useless clutter in there, but the important info was basically right there. That was quite useable, well done there!
To clarify: that is the info I need. Show me what's new and what is changed. Everything else is for the store.
What we have now, long story short, is the specials box gone (bit benefit of doubt here, since the anniversary sale is ongoing and it might make its return after that - though I have no idea where you want to put it) and the news dead last at the bottom. Why?
While we're here, let's talk about curated collections. They seem to be somewhat fixed at the moment, so we can all have a look at the same thing:
[i]
Slitherine's Strategies
Sword or Sorcery
Activision's Evergreens
Time for Tycoons
Jump Around
Play with Friends
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Thinking is Hard [/i] (as is biting one's tongue, by the way)
Edit: you know what, I'm not even trying to repair the broken tags, because it really fits into the whole discussion, doesn't it.
These all link to filtered store pages with no further explanation, so I'm guessing here:
Multiplayer, 2x developer. 3x genre that's covered by tags, 2x genre that's not covered well by tags
Meaning: if you had your tags in order, we could just go to the store, filter for e.g. "puzzle" and get pretty much the same result. With no completely wasted space on the front page.
Also while curated collections sort of make sense on Steam, because frankly any old drivel gets onto their shelves, may I remind you that
your entire store is already curated to begin with, so what's the bloody point? As I'm writing this, a wild store overhaul appeared, so let's have a look.
First of all: holy wasted horizontal space!
More to the point of functionality: if I resize the window to ~50%, the filter sidebar collapses and suddenly I get an acceptable amount of games shown. Sort of good. However, if I go back to the original size, the filters don't reappear. This feels incredibly inconsistent.
Next, filtering for discounted works fine, selecting the On Sale tab however kills my selected filters. This makes it a tad useless. Also, I know this is an oversight and it's not intended, but since operating system is a filter this does have an air of slap in the face. On top of all that: incredibly inconsistent.
Also, can we have text for the game titles? There are several cases (think games with different editions) where the game cover isn't exactly distinctive and the title in written form would massively help.
Lastly, I've written a post in the anniversary thread in which I tried to be positive and shine a light on some of the awesome things you guys have consistently done in the last decade. I mentioned worrying trends in the last paragraph. Far be it from me to tell you what Gog supposedly stands for, but you have an Upcomming (games that aren't out yet) tab in your store, and if that's not demonstrably embracing pre-order culture, I don't know what is.
I would have liked to point out something positive like I did with the overhauled reviews on the game pages, but I got nothing this time.
So yeah, I hope I could adequatly convey criticism that at least carries somewhat of a productive flavour in illuminating some of the problems. If I may point out, another way not to have numerous rants in this topic is to turn them into a dialog. All the "why"s I've used in this topic as well as in the other thread don't have to be purely rhetorical.
Why not - and I am sincerely not taking the piss here - have a news article where you talk about the thought behind the changes, what we as customers get out of it, that sort of stuff. We've been treated to A LOT of "Try Galaxy! Have you tried Galaxy yet? Here, let me put Galaxy in your game installers!" because so many users were allegedly incredibly confused about the "is there a client like steam?" subject.
Looks to me like a decent chunk of your long time customers are pretty confused about these design changes right now, so I'm looking forward to it.
