Alexim: THANKS FELLOW HUMAN, THIS INFORMATION IS MUCH APPRECIATED AND EASY TO INCORPORATE INTO MY CARBON-BASED LOGIC PROCESSES.

Breja: Ok, but you could still turn this

Sale's theme: Survival games
Deepest discount: 90% off
End date: 17th January 2022, 2 PM UTC.

Into this:

This Weekly Sale's theme is Survival games, with deepest discount reaching 90% off! Be sure to grab something before it ends on 17th January 2022, 2 PM UTC.

in a minute, and already you have a post that looks more friendly and like something written by a person and not a bot.

Also, and this is probably not up to you, but I can only repeat that while this sort of minimalistic announcement is ok for opening the forum thread, but it's quite pointless for the news on the home page to lead to a separate page with this barebones info. It would make infinitely more sense to just have the news on the home page to lead straight to the game/sale page where all the info is.

karnak1: Thank you very much for taking the time to communicate with us and addressing the news issue, Michal. I very much appreciate that and I sincerely wish the GOG staff would interact more with us customers. It'd probably create less issues regarding controversial site changes.

And here's my feedback for the matter at hand:
1 - I absolutely agree with you that lengthy texts regarding the weekly sales are irrelevant. Since you'll repeat thematic sales (survival, RPG, Roguelike, etc etc) several times during the year I think it doesn't make sense to present something which we already know what it's about. IMO you don't need to have any introductory text for them.

2 - I think every new game or publisher on the store should at least deserve a paragraph writing something about its background.
Like: what sort of influences, styles have inspired the game, what country is the publisher/dev from, what other games have they created... that sort of thing. Like a sort of introductory speech. Nothing too complex, I think a mere paragraph would do.

Those were just my 2 cents. Again, thanks for addressing the community and listening to us.

Chasmancer: Keep it brief if you want, but in a single sentence, at least, tell people what's great about the game and why this game should be bought, and if it is a sale you announce, what games are the greatest deals in it - like you already do, but consistently, for every sale. I reckon this would help.

joppo: The problem with this idea is that then you lose all connection between a News post (or wherever clicking a front page News item will lead to) and the corresponding forum thread.

Well, they could change sale pages to add that link somewhere, but I don't think their system is anywhere close to prepared to make that change. If their system is set up the way I think it is it will require new database columns and some heavy work to fill them with data from previous sales.

Next you have to do something about the disconnect between game releases and the release threads as well. With multiple versions of a game getting released at different times you have several candidates for the position of "release forum thread" for a particular game. It wouldn't be easy to decide for one.

TL;DR: It'd be messy.

Chasmancer: And thank you for listening to us, Michał.
Chasmancer: It isn't a holy cow, something I cut down from that post that I probably shouldn't have (because I already included it in the previous post on the subject in another thread) was an explanation that people are just annoyed by how unhelpful and lazy those posts felt. Cutting the news pages to bare, perfunctory game title helps nobody, and is way more annoying a change than if you'd linked the games directly when people click on the news banner. You'll want to avoid being seen as lazy and uncaring, especially now that once-stellar and fast support had been largely replaced by a bot that is anything but helpful.

But back to the subject, of course these news posts and even forum threads themselves could be done away with entirely if you want, but you'd still need something to draw people's attention to new games and convince them to buy games from the going sale, and that something should at least appear to be more appealing and more convenient than what we have now.

For me, there should be at least a scrollable newsfeed on the main page, seen right as you open it, on the right of those huge banners, perhaps, that would show the new games and their genre tags, and be scrollable back to at least a month ago or so. Sort of like GOG Weekly, but more visible and fully automated.

Secondly, the sale pages should highlight the games that have lowest price there was (silver background or border, perhaps) and games that have prices lower than they ever were before (gold? use other colours if you think they'd work better). Many people would buy something they're otherwise unsure about if they know it's the best deal ever, and this can also be fully automated as well, cutting down the unnecessary routine. Also, let items on sale page lists be sortable by price and discount, you do that for general search already, shouldn't be hard to follow up.

Once again, it isn't something sacred and immutable, and can prolly be changed for the better. And I appreciate you reading and considering our feedback.