One of the things I hated the most about Steam has now come to GOG. Videos (hosted from Youtube) that play automatically on the store homepage in Galaxy, on mouseover in search results, and probably other circumstances I haven't encountered yet.

Needless to say, this really sucks. Modern web browsers have started to disallow videos from autoplaying because it's an intrusive, bad experience. If the user wants to watch a video — wants to be marketed to — they can press play.

GOG should at least have an option to turn off auto-playing videos for logged-in users. I know I'll be less likely to look at the GOG storefront as often if it assaults my eyes, ears, C/GPU cycles, & bandwidth without asking me, and I know I'm not alone.

That sucking sound is the noise of my data rapidly being drawn towards my deprioritization limit.

Yes that can become a problem. I find it's a huge problem with netflix now.

However I don't find steam to be that intrusive personally, because I can have the sound on videos muted by default so I can just ignore them. They also only come up once you've opened up a game's store page, not when just browsing, so if I'm getting a video it's because I'm genuinely interested in the game. There's a big difference between having them forced on you when you're not looking for them, versus having them brought up for you when you show interest in them. It became a huge problem in steam a few months ago when they had live streams autoplaying when you opened a game, but they fairly quickly added an option to remove those if you want.

Gog is a little awkward right now, but to be fair you can avoid having those videos load up as long as you don't mouse cursor over them, and there's enough empty space that it's not hard to do that. At the moment I think gog is worse than steam with those autoplaying videos. Netflix is much worse than either, though.

I agree with this. Default should be opt in as usual rather than opt out. Just make it very easy to click play.

I agree with this with the addition that auto loading/playing of videos should not be on by default for users that are not logged in. I only log in to the site when I want to post something on the forums, buy something or download something. I don't want to deal with the annoyances just because I'm not logged in.

Yepp, very annoying. And slows down the site aswell.

Agreed (to both). The problem is not so much the "feature" but the way it's forced on consumers.

I don't use Galaxy, but if they would introduce this "feature" in the browser, without any option to turn it off, I'd be pretty pissed, too. There was a time when GOG's marketing was all about being customer-friendly and distinguishing itself from the competition with its bad practices. Nowadays it seems they just try to mimick them.

Signed, for the same reasons which others have already pointed out. Automatic video advertisements, sounds and animations are annoying and always have been, ever since their first appearances on the web.

This type of aggressive, in-your-face advertising is the reason why I keep ad-blockers/ content filters active most of the time, and it significantly lowers my desire to keep visiting a website or storefront.

I can only speak for myself here, but when I'm not interested in a product, I won't change my mind no matter how hard you try to sell it to me. It's more likely to have the opposite effect, and I'll ignore the product and company entirely.

The worst effects are all done through JavaScript (even when that's not the best way to do them), so you can suppress them by blocking script on the site. Blocking script also breaks posting on the forum (which shouldn't require JavaScript, but does) and showing prices on the homepage (which absolutely should not require JavaScript, but does), so there are tradeoffs. You can still read the forum without JavaScript (although some things are broken).

I find the inability to see pricing to be quite funny, since (1) it shouldn't need script at all, and (2) by including features that force me to disable scripting to block them, GOG has forced me to not see good deals, so I'm less likely to buy anything. If the site had more granular toggles to disable the bad features without blocking all script, I would. It doesn't, so the few good features (pricing) are tossed out with the many bad features.

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As regards auto-play for logged out users, there's no technical reason they couldn't have a cookie-tracked opt-in for auto-play that logged out users could manipulate. It wouldn't persist across cookie clearings the way a server-side account preference could, but it'd be otherwise functional. It's the same principal as many stores that can remember your preferred sort order, currency, etc. even when you're logged out.