Entering a new year is like leveling up in a game – new adventures and challenges await, which you approach with all previously gained skills. This is a moment that drives us, and today we’d like to give you a general overview of what is to come this year on GOG, but without spoilers – no one likes those.2021 went with many exciting activities on GOG as well as – let’s be open about it – with some hard knocks. All of those events allow us to gain more experience, learn from our successes and mistakes and grow in our constant pursuit of delivering you the best gamer-centric platform – with a selection of exceptional games, from timeless classics to new releases, and respect for ownership. This approach won’t change this year either, and we’d like to let you know about two areas that we’re putting in the spotlight in 2022.
Let’s start with
the platform experience. This is a big one, as we want you to have the best experience when buying the game of your choosing, browsing the catalog, checking the best deals and new releases, finding hidden gems, or discovering that next game to play! There is a lot we can improve here – we know – and this year our development teams’ pipelines are full of projects we hope you’ll enjoy. While we won’t be sharing the exact features just yet, we want to highlight the few that have already been released and are available on GOG, which should give you a good sense of things to come.
First and foremost is
the new and improved catalog that has recently gone live to all users. It brings you a new way to carry out more customized searches, sort and filter games by price and release date range, genres, and tags. With your help, we were able to first test the new catalog by slowly rolling it out to more users, monitoring its performance, and gathering initial feedback. Judging by some of your comments, we can already see you appreciate the ease of navigating the offer, especially during bigger sales, and how fast the catalog works – thanks! Our devs are planning further improvements like expanding the tags system – adding new ones, improving filtering, or giving an option to exclude tags from results. Oh, and one more thing – we've heard you were missing the "all-time bestsellers" sorting option. Well, it's back!
Secondly, we want to keep on improving your experience with GOG GALAXY. The client remains an important part of our platform and offers a unique way of interacting with GOG, if you decide to use it. Our approach right now focuses on
making the main view in GOG GALAXY more dynamic and live – one way to do it is to show what cool stuff is happening on the platform, something you may have noticed during the Winter Sale when we highlighted the event and the giveaways. In the coming weeks, we will be testing some more changes in the client, so if you’d like to see them first, make sure to toggle the “Experimental features and updates” option in the settings.
And since we’re on the topic of testing, there are more features to come this year, and we’d like to
keep you involved in the process. That’s why, before releasing improvements to all users, we will be asking some of you to test these ideas and share your feedback with us, just as we did with the new catalog. With some features, we’ll want to surprise you, so expect the unexpected improvements as well!
And what is the second area of our focus, you may ask. It’s games, of course! But not just any games – it’s about classics. While we’re years from calling ourselves Good Old Games, we remember our roots, and those games will always have a special place in our hearts and on GOG. We get that actions speak louder than words, that’s why we will
increase our activities around classic games. This means a plethora of things – from preparing articles and interviews about those meaningful titles, running dedicated sales and special deals, through adding more digital goodies all the way to releasing even more classic games we all miss. As for the latter, obviously we’ll keep those surprises a secret for now, but looking at the classics we brought back in Q4 2021, like
Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain or
Star Trek: Armada I &
II, you get what we’re aiming for.
Just like with the store experience, the same goes for classic games – you may have already seen our first activities around them. For some time now we’re cooperating with
The Video Game History Foundation on
the Throwback Thursday initiative. Putting a spotlight on our favorite “good old games”, and adding personal stories from the GOG Team members was a no-brainer and we don’t know why it took us so long! The formula is still evolving though, so expect some updates here as well.
During the Winter Sale, thanks to the Foundation’s huge archive of assets, we were able to add new bonus goodies to titles like
Tomb Raider 1+2+3,
Nox,
Total Annihilation,
Thief The Dark Project, and more. Your reception was amazing – for the very first time we’ve put on sale The Video Game History Foundation Support Pack, a bundle from which all proceeds go to the Foundation. Thanks to you, we managed to gather more than $4,000 USD that will support preserving, celebrating, and teaching the history of video games. You’re the best – thank you!
That is all for now – while we don’t want to spoil any specific features, releases, or activities, we hope you like this small heads-up from us at GOG. Let us know if this type of update is something you would like to see more often, what is missing that you would definitely want us to share (having in mind sometimes we just can’t reveal some of the stuff), and share constructive feedback about our plans for 2022!
