Posted October 23, 2018
high rated
To give you a little bit of background, I live in a country where the internet is, let's face it, poor as all hell. The speeds are typically horrid, and even if you have some speed that is a little decent, more often than not you don't get the ability to use the entire speed given. Unlimited data plans are getting phased out in favor of limited caps, with the most generous being 500GBs (if you pay of course) of data allowance monthly, with mine being a very modest 100GBs limit before being kicked into the 1Mbps unlimited tier for the rest of the month...suffice to say that the increasing trends towards moving to Netflix-like streaming models HURT me because that means western media is more likely to become streaming-exclusive and less accessible to countries like mine.
Which brings me to my next point. If you're not going to handle the redesign all that well, don't even bother and give us the old design back. Aesthetically, in theory, it's decent, but the way you handle it doesn't even keep it in a good light for long.
First of all is the increasing reliance on auto-playing thumbnails. Trust me, I checked the store now, there is barely any room to hover your mouse on a GOG screen without triggering an auto-play video. Seriously. How can I browse the store, no, a web page, if hovering anywhere on it means loads of autoplaying videos?
Secondly, the site redesign means that on a slow day, there is one huge banner on the top to display new releases or major events. Which makes it jarring when you have a special event like Thronebreaker's release, which has a banner dedicated wholly to it. On the old design, it would've been just Thronebreaker's banner, and then the rest of the site made sense, but on the redesign, the result is two huge banners pushing the rest of the site to the bottom. It's a scroll just to get to the meat of GOG, with the top not even making any sense. That could be remedied by taking a page from the old design and shrinking the main banner (not the Thronebreaker one) to take up the left or right half, and fill the other half with any other elements. Like NEWS for example; who scrolls to the end of a page for news anyway?
Even on mobile, the banners look ridiculous. There's loads of people saying the site is now mobile friendly and not desktop friendly; but even I am not convinced it is mobile friendly.
Thirdly, geez, the full-screen ad you employed for Thronebreaker. Seriously? It's not only an extra step towards going to the store (which already has a special banner for this very game), but it yet again employs auto-playing videos so even if you don't hover over the tiles, you still get some mandatory video played.
GOG. I love you as a company. There's no denying you're a beacon of light in an industry that keeps releasing DRM mechanisms upon DRM mechanisms; just ask Discord and their crappy new store. But please, you need to stop making us impatient and driving us to insanity. As much as everyone likes to say the PC platform is about choices, just look at what we actually have for choices: one mega-platform that is trying to do everything in its power to expand its influence and keep its users by hook or by crook, other several stores made to serve the publisher that opened them, several more stores that sell keys meant to be used with the aforementioned mega-platform...and there's you, someone who does things a little differently from the rest of the pack - for which you are loved. If you want to retain your userbase and keep expanding, you'll need to not make your users scream and screech at every corner. You have to do things a different way.
Instead of just pushing the redesign out of the door, you can
1) roll it back
2) relegate it to a controlled beta channel and get feedback from there
3) be like reddit and have both old and new designs co-exist
Which brings me to my next point. If you're not going to handle the redesign all that well, don't even bother and give us the old design back. Aesthetically, in theory, it's decent, but the way you handle it doesn't even keep it in a good light for long.
First of all is the increasing reliance on auto-playing thumbnails. Trust me, I checked the store now, there is barely any room to hover your mouse on a GOG screen without triggering an auto-play video. Seriously. How can I browse the store, no, a web page, if hovering anywhere on it means loads of autoplaying videos?
Secondly, the site redesign means that on a slow day, there is one huge banner on the top to display new releases or major events. Which makes it jarring when you have a special event like Thronebreaker's release, which has a banner dedicated wholly to it. On the old design, it would've been just Thronebreaker's banner, and then the rest of the site made sense, but on the redesign, the result is two huge banners pushing the rest of the site to the bottom. It's a scroll just to get to the meat of GOG, with the top not even making any sense. That could be remedied by taking a page from the old design and shrinking the main banner (not the Thronebreaker one) to take up the left or right half, and fill the other half with any other elements. Like NEWS for example; who scrolls to the end of a page for news anyway?
Even on mobile, the banners look ridiculous. There's loads of people saying the site is now mobile friendly and not desktop friendly; but even I am not convinced it is mobile friendly.
Thirdly, geez, the full-screen ad you employed for Thronebreaker. Seriously? It's not only an extra step towards going to the store (which already has a special banner for this very game), but it yet again employs auto-playing videos so even if you don't hover over the tiles, you still get some mandatory video played.
GOG. I love you as a company. There's no denying you're a beacon of light in an industry that keeps releasing DRM mechanisms upon DRM mechanisms; just ask Discord and their crappy new store. But please, you need to stop making us impatient and driving us to insanity. As much as everyone likes to say the PC platform is about choices, just look at what we actually have for choices: one mega-platform that is trying to do everything in its power to expand its influence and keep its users by hook or by crook, other several stores made to serve the publisher that opened them, several more stores that sell keys meant to be used with the aforementioned mega-platform...and there's you, someone who does things a little differently from the rest of the pack - for which you are loved. If you want to retain your userbase and keep expanding, you'll need to not make your users scream and screech at every corner. You have to do things a different way.
Instead of just pushing the redesign out of the door, you can
1) roll it back
2) relegate it to a controlled beta channel and get feedback from there
3) be like reddit and have both old and new designs co-exist
Post edited October 23, 2018 by PookaMustard
