I have added the ability to remember your preferred country / grouping / sort / filters. Click the "Remember and apply these settings by default" button underneath the applied filters. From then on, these will be applied automatically, specifically:
- when you visit the homepage
- when you search (with the explicit option to search without applying defaults)

You can still navigate to other countries, toggle off default filters, change the sort, toggle the grouping, etc as you'd expect. To make that possible without messing with state, defaults won't be applied if the URL contains
- any selected filter (also since that filter might conflict with your defaults, e.g. requiring and excluding the same field) - so someone can link to the results for a specific filter, and you will see what they intended.
- "defaults=false", which is automatically applied when changing country/grouping/sorting/removing the last filter - but for urls without filters, and without this variable, your defaults would override the intent.

Building this feature was a lot harder than it has any right to be. I had a bit of a combinatorial explosion with all the possible fields interacting together, and the way I'd modeled some data structures wasn't helping either. I managed to whack it into a shape which I'm mostly happy about, though. There are some ugly-ish corner-cases which I hope no one will notice consciously, but it's also quite possible that you'll encounter actual bugs - so if you see something behave in an unexpected way, please let me know! (It'd be very helpful to then include the exact URL you're on, together with the contents of your "defaults" cookie.)

Doing this for individual games remains for the long-term future (though I'm actively working toward it), but you can now remember excluding publishers/genres/... and thus have them never show up.

Remember and apply preferred country and sorting: ✅

Remember and apply preferred grouping: ✅

So to make this work well together with the new option to remember and apply country/sort/grouping/filters, this is what you need to know:
- If you want your current defaults to apply to such a search, you should use the url with just the ?q=%s parameter (so without any other parameters - that way the defaults will always be added to it, and you won't need to update your browser search when your preferred defaults change).
- If you do NOT want your current defaults to apply to such a search, you should add &defaults=false to the url.

Nice job!

Thank you so much!

I am probably doing something wrong.

1) I go to https://gamesieve.com/
2) as expected, the url changes to https://gamesieve.com/?okay_tag=nsfw (remembering my past save)
3) I change grouping to NO
4) as expected, the url changes to https://gamesieve.com/?group=false&okay_tag=nsfw (adding the new option)
5) I go again to https://gamesieve.com/
6) the url is as it was on (2), not on (4), and the grouping is YES (i.e. the grouping was not remembered)

What am I doing wrong?

Between 4) and 5) you should click the "Remember and apply these settings by default" button, directly underneath the applied filters. Unlike the NSFW setting, the potential impact of these wider defaults is too large to do this completely automatically - so I require a deliberate action. (Remembering the last state also wouldn't be particularly useful for the vast majority of usecases.)

Oh. Thank you. Got it.

So, is "do not ignore NSFW" handled differently (no need to save it explicitly)?

Yep, that caught me out too at first, since I was checking by changing the country and wasn't looking anywhere else. Once I picked another filter the button was obvious, since it was right under the newly displayed filter, and anybody who'd actually look at the results instead of just testing in a hurry would see it first.
Seems like it. Guess that's because that's a different cookie. At least my manually added search engine entry has that tag included and it doesn't affect the (other) saved filters.

Correct.
(I thought about folding it into this new solution, but saw enough benefit for it to remain available separately as well - although that made it more confusing here.)

Understandable. Good show! Many thanks again.

P.S. Just a thought. I don't really need it, but I think others might find it useful.

Consider adding for each game that is on sale until what date/time it is expected to be on sale.

Oh, GOG. I guess API stands for A Partial Implementation.

Thanks for checking.

So this number just went up by 11 to 17, due to Devil May Cry 4, which has an upgraded edition, 8 DLCs and a bundle, each of which is not available in Japan and has an alternative.
I'm not handling showing those alternatives as gracefully as I'd like - working to improve that! => done

N̶o̶ ̶w̶a̶y̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶f̶i̶l̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶a̶v̶a̶i̶l̶a̶b̶i̶l̶i̶t̶y̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶s̶p̶e̶c̶i̶f̶i̶c̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶n̶t̶r̶i̶e̶s̶ ̶(̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶J̶a̶p̶a̶n̶)̶,̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶?̶

Nevermind, I just saw the answer to that.

It's been annoying me that changing the sort-order of results has a separate button you have to click to implement the change, but clicking any filter checkbox engages that filter automatically (which is especially annoying because it resets the entire page -- meaning that, if you want to check multiple options, you must keep scrolling back down to where you were, checking another box, scrolling back down, checking another box, etc.).
I would prefer that this be reversed: filtering requires a final confirmation after you're done checking any boxes you want to, but changing the sort-order takes effect instantly; or, at least, made consistent: all changes require an overall confirmation before being enacted. If the latter, it might also be a good idea to move the "Sort by" dropdown & "Go" button to the sidebar.

I understand the annoyance, and acknowledge that this difference and behaviour is not ideal. It's not going to change anytime soon, but I can explain why the difference exists, why I think this is the best possible trade-off for now, and what I hope to eventually offer.

To start with the very basics: HTML has two types of interactive elements for navigation - links, and forms. Links you click, causing an immediate result (and can open in a new tab, bookmark, etc), while forms you input information in, and then submit as a separate step (and most browsers only allow doing so within the current tab).

All my filters are links - even then ones which are styled with a checkbox. Those aren't real checkboxes (which are form elements), but just a visualization to make it clear that you can select multiple of them (which would be an "OR"-operation on them, where the filters without checkboxes take effect on top of each other, so an "AND"-operation). Filters show how many results will be on the page after clicking them, and a filter which would cause zero results isn't useful, so won't show (so if you select price=free, the discount filters disappear, and vice versa).

The number of games on GOG is on the small side for this type of filtering interface, so if I were to make filtering a form, many people would end up selecting combinations of filters causing zero results, and it'd be technically infeasible for me to indicate usefully which filter-combinations in particular would cause this.

I very much realize toggling several options in multi-select filters is annoying, which is why I added the "Not free" and decade nesting as a tiny mitigating step, and have "expert mode" on the roadmap. That will offer an alternative filtering interface where all of it will be a form, where my hope is that people using it will apply some knowledge of the limitation of the filters to it - but I still expect it to not be nearly as pleasant to use as it'd currently seem. (I hope I'll be wrong about that.)

Creating this form and keeping it updated with all further development will be a massive chore (not difficult in itself, but boring and finicky work), which I'm not looking forward to, and will only undertake once I have the feeling that the site is otherwise feature-complete.

Sorting could be done with 6-7 links as well, and from a pure functionality point of view, that would be better. The reason I picked a form there is mostly to save space (the UI is crammed quite full already), which I believe to be okay since changing the sorting is generally something you do "once" for a given search, instead of all the time based on the results you see after each step.
Many sites out there use JavaScript to auto-submit such forms on changing the selected value, just so you don't have to press a "Go" button, but this has major accessibility impact: people who navigate by keyboard rather than by mouse have to press the arrow-down key to 'scroll' past each option, which would trigger such an auto-submit, so if they'd want to sort by the bottom option, that'd cause 6-7 full page loads plus additional navigation each time to get focus back to that selectbox. This is simply not something I find acceptable.

I could implement a fancy widget which looks like a selectbox but functions like a bunch of links, but getting accessibility right for that is hard - and it's just not worth it for such a control, at least not at this stage of the site's development.

If you look at GOG's store page, you can see that they've basically chosen the route of doing everything with fancy JavaScript widgets and custom auto-submitting behaviour for their form elements - and that their site is absolutely impossible to use with keyboard navigation. I, meanwhile, am very deliberately sticking to the basic HTML functionality. There are some definite benefits to GOG's way, and I understand every step in the thought process which has led them there - but that's not a route I'm interested in going as a solo dev who mostly likes to tinker with things he likes to tinker with, and to spend as little time as possible on the rest. And personally, on the whole, I prefer the result of my UI. :)