Arr! ^°

Query for everyone reading this: Give me a top 3 of features from my roadmap (or other ideas you have yourself) which you'd most love to see? I'm nearing the end of the easily implemented features that I can just slot in, so some guidance for where to direct my attention next would be welcome. :)

(I'm not going to blindly implement whatever is most desired, as there might be dependencies between features, or technical roadblocks - but I'll definitely try to do justice to any consensus wishes.)

1) import owned games
2) import wishlisted games
3) support ignored games

Actually, forgot one that is my #1 priority:
- filter and/or sort by "Time to beat"

Very useful when I'm looking for a really short game to play.

:'( on "everyone reading this" apparently being only a single person. (Or maybe everyone thinks my site is already perfection-incarnate in its current form, with nothing left to improve? Yes, that does sound much more likely!) :)

For me these are all aspects of what's basically the same (huge) feature. I'll do some early exploration this week of how feasible various aspects are, but it's not going to be something which will be fast to implement, even if all tests unexpectedly show that things would go smoothly.

I'd love to add this! Unfortunately howlongtobeat doesn't have a public API (there's a thread on their forums where they've been talking about the possibility of one for many years - I'm guessing they must have a non-public one for commercial partners like GOG by now, but who knows if they'll ever open it up? And no, I'm not willing to scrape the data), while igdb simply does not have enough playtime data for integration to be useful, and rawg only has average playtime from Steam. (That'll mostly tell you how swiftly people got bored with a game (e.g. "1 hour" for Diablo). I'll poke at that a bit more, but am probably going to rule that to be non-useful - feel free to change my mind if you disagree.)

Today I've added a small UI improvement to easily filter by all prices other than free, or filter by original release decade, e.g. all games from the 90s. That should save people some clicking and annoyance with having to scroll down to the same filter again and again.

So this (excluding free games) is now only a single additional click on "Not free", rather than the 6-7 from before.
The general "expert mode" solution for this is still in the far future, but this is hopefully already a noticeable improvement in this area.

I know about howlongtobeat. It was painful to maintain on MaGog.

I was thinking about your taking the information displayed on the GOG game page. Is that not available via the GOG API?

Alas, no. I suspect that one of the conditions for GOG to be allowed to use it, is that they're not allowed to redistribute it.

Hmm - though I guess I should check where the store pages get it from, if it's in the store API? I would be okay with using it from there... Brb, and thanks for asking! :D

edit: alas, no - it's inserted into the store page server-side, so once again that'd require scraping, which I don't want to do.

Sorry, meant to reply earlier and then forgot about it. I agree with stuff like wishlist import and ignoring games.
Also the more advanced search from your roadmap sounds great :-)

Alas. Thanks for checking.

Yay! :)


No, just a really busy long holiday weekend over here AND you've been doing such a great job with this on your own schedule and time ... even if not quite perfection-incarnate - yet. :P

My own uses for this wonderful site is less personal and more specific to gifting and GA ideas, so I figure I'm probably less likely to be your 'normal' type of user.

1) My biggest request would be the 'Expert-mode' for filters: form with checkboxes for multi-select, and range/numeric-input for prices, discounts, e.a. This for my uses would be overwhelmingly helpful. You've already said you have it down on the list for future and are looking more into it. :)

2) Categorize expansions as "purely cosmetic" yes/no? could also be nice, but I am also used to looking that up myself.

For most users I would think the Wishlist, Owned Games and Ignore along with the more advanced search filters would be popular requests.

Thank you all for the additional feedback! :)

Just to make certain I understand correctly: you want to collapse individual filter blocks (e.g. "Tags"), so that the lower ones are easier to access? Or would you want to collapse the entire column?
Whichever one it is: you'd presumably then want that collapsed state to be remembered on every subsequent visit?

This is the other "really big" item on the roadmap, though still an order of magnitude less complex than owned/wishlist/etc. It has the benefit of only needing changes in the "front-end" of the application, but is going to be really finicky to get right and not hamper future development. It'll probably depend on my mood which one I'll pick up first.

Speaking only for myself: As cool as your site is, it's mostly of use to people when they're browsing the store for something to buy or wishlist. Most of the features I can think of that I'd really like to see somewhere would be a much better fit for GOG Database, and since Yepoleb doesn't seem to have either the time or inclination to add much more in terms of new user-facing features, I'm probably SOL on those for the foreseeable future. For my general purposes -- as someone who spends more time playing games than shopping for them (and for whom gaming is only one of a few main pastimes) -- often the store search functions on GOG itself are "good enough".
There are probably a few features it would make sense to suggest for gamesieve (BTW, was GOGsieve already taken? :P ), but which would rely on info that GOG doesn't provide, or that they provide inconsistently or (often) incorrectly/misleadingly. Which would mean a ton more work for you for the required "enrichment"/"doing GOG's job for them".

I will say, an advanced search mode would be nice. Let people choose which specific field(s) the keyword(s) should search, disable any "maybe you meant...?" inclusions (one of my few big complaints about GOG's current search function), essentially search multiple terms separately and output everything in one pool of results (something GOG supported in the past, via " | " separators), and probably some more things I'm not thinking of right now.

I guess improved searchability of titles included in bundles would be cool. (Searching "shape up or slip out" didn't return the Leisure Suit Larry bundle as a result, even though "lounge lizards" did.) Not super high-priority.

And while I'm posting, I might as well nitpick: the use of the term "expansions" to indicate all DLC containing only or primarily in-game content seems strange to me. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like it's most commonly used to indicate particularly meaty additional gameplay modules, while the old term "add-ons" (which I suggest as an alternative) was used both to refer to the smaller pieces of post-release content, and as a catch-all including both those and the larger expansions, similar to how "DLC" is used now. (It looks like you're trying to distinguish between in-game stuff and DLC that's mostly-to-entirely out-of-game downloadables like soundtracks and the like, which you've labeled "goodies" -- fair enough there, since you're trying to go for brevity.)

Anyway, great work so far, from what little I've used Gamesieve :)

I don't think I'll want to go that way. This becomes very niche/poweruser-only. I might eventually enable a few specific overrides to my catch-all search, but mostly I try to get my weighting correct so that whatever you want will automatically float to the top. (And so please mention any examples where I get this wrong. I'll of course never be able to get it 100% perfect for all usecases, but there's really a ton which can be done with carefully tweaking the weights and boosts - I just need to be aware of good distinguishing queries.)

Hah, I was just going to comment on this one, as I noticed it in my logs. I'm just not searching that "includes" data which I added last week (lounge lizards matches on two separate words in the description, which is why that worked), but that's a complete oversight, so this'll probably start working sometime later today.

Yeah, I label it as "Expansion / DLC" in the sidebar, and in the product type filter (when not grouping), but the labels for grouping products were already getting too long, and using "DLC" for proper expansions felt worse. I've personally never used "add-on" for this purpose - but will ponder it as a replacement. (Probably I'm stuck with my current labeling though, since I use expansion in filters, and thus in URL parameters, which I don't want to break. Naming things is hard.)

Oh, and:
Feel free to name them anyway - they probably won't be a priority, but if I can see a way to slot them in neatly during any future developments, it's always good to be aware of them being something that people want.