Wow. What in the nine realms is this piece of crap passing for a BYOB sale page? Congratulations @Gog, you outdid yourselves this time.
You know @Gog, you guys have a history of downgrading every piece of good UI you guys have whenever there is an update.
The old website was sleek and had the news on top, where they are most useful, thus came your 10th anniversary change and we got a bloated memoryhog with autoplaying videos, unneeded "gog-statics" resource hosting and a news carousel at the bottom. The change of the "News" section also included the stupid decision to show no more than 11 cards, which means that sometimes news will cycle out of the front page
in the same day they were posted!
GogMixes are useful and set you apart from your competitors? Why, we can't have that of course! So they get axed and never replaced with anything alike, despite promises that they would be.
Most people don't remember by now the
old game card pages, but I still remember them as being fast, beautiful and pretty good at concentrating the useful info. Clicking a screenshot would have it appear in a bigger frame in a fraction of the time it takes in today's website. BTW, I still long for the old GOG logo in green and orange. But I guess grey and monochromatic is somehow better, despite boring? Whatever.
The old regular sale page also was faster, less memory intensive and would push owned games to the bottom when it was substituted by a new page that had exactly
ZERO advantages over the old one. Let's be fair tho, after billions of complaints you guys slowly added filters and checkboxes that bring new functionality that the old page did not have, like showing only DLC for owned games. So in the end it did eventually become an upgrade, it just cost us a lot of white hairs and several gallons of tears.
I am not even gonna thoroughly detail the change from Galaxy 1.2 to 2.0, because I am not a Galaxy user, but from what I read lots of people consider it was a step forward three steps back.
This is why I shudder whenever people suggest that you guys need to replace the forum. Because I know that, whatever your designer comes up with will bring
half the functionality we're used to to bring some half-baked solutions to the current problems that prompted said (certainly resource-hungry and ugly) new forum.
But the new BYOB sale page takes the cake. It doesn't make it easy to add the games to the cart like the old one made so easy with the checkboxes: now you have to hover over the game's card and click the "add to cart" button. It doesn't show exactly how much a game will cost before you go to Checkout, making it confusing to even see if there is an extra discount at all. It doesn't show how many games you already own from the bundle so you can know how many you need for the extra discount. Heck, it doesn't even pushes owned games to the end so we don't have to scroll through every game! What exactly is better in this new format compared to the previous BYOB page?
Bear in mind the majority of these flaws come from a crappy DESIGN rather than poor coding. So my advice is that you sack whoever designed this change and so many appalling stupid designs in the past, then sack whoever hired /promoted that person to be a designer in the first place. None of them are capable of doing their job. And hire the best you can for these positions, but even if you can't find much talent available really anyone will be an improvement.
But let it not be said I ignore the good parts to focus on stuff I can complain about. You guys are doing good in acquiring games like the Sega archive, you got rid of the chatbot, and the situation of disparity between Galaxy/offline installers DID improve. Also, freebies like the current one are nice (despite my already owning this one) except when it is a WhaleRock piece of junk. So thanks for the freebie. You guys rock. I mean, most of you do.