Hi GOG,

now you've re-designed your entire page and you've added several new sorting options to the store. But one sorting option that some users are asking for since more than 5 years is still missing. The option to sort the games by (current) price. It can't be difficult to implement. It also can't be that you are unaware that this sorting option is useful. It is a standard in many online shops after all. So my big question is:

What does GOG have against sorting by price?

It's a serious question. I'm not trying to be witty here. I am actually interested in your reasoning. What made you decide against the 'sort by price' option?

There are five pricing criteria to pick from.

Considering that at any one time, there's around four pages of games on sale, I'm not entirely sure what more one would need.

There's 50 games a page.

Your post is no answer to the imho serious question. And I as well don‘t see a technical reason why there is no „sort by price“ option. Would be nice to get an official reason why that is.

The only technical reason I can see is that sorting is done by the database (presumably, the queries come pre sorted so I assume it's the database sorting) so there may be some issue with this (I can't see one off the top of my head, but it's possible) or it's to do with the various different prices, base price, discounted price, different currencies, making it more complicated.
Obviously it is possible to sort by price with all those options as other stores do it, but this being GOG I can imagine their system is not best designed for that purpose (and combined with the database thing it could be the final price isn't available in the database to perform a sort on).

I've only just noticed they redesigned the catalogue pages, did they actually add new sorting options? I can't remember which ones we used to have..

Okay, here's a more technical shrug:

GOG has some 2700 products listed in their catalog. This total is added to on a weekly basis.

GOG has 5 or so currencies to track. So then you have to multiply that into a very large number of data entries. True, this can be automated, but then you have to account for variables like sales, discounts, and such.

As you can see, there'd be a lot of number to track, changing daily.

Well, magog managed to implement that sorting option for the GOG database many years ago. And that was a one-person fan-project. So why shouldn't GOG themselves be able to implement it? Database size or IT-team size aren't valid arguments either. Small companies like fireflower-games offer the option to sort by price and huge companies like Steam or Amazon (who have a way bigger database than GOG) offer that option too. So if the GOG IT team really isn't able to implement that because of 'difficulties', they should look for some other job where they don't have to use these mysterious devices called computers. ;-)

Or more seriously: I doubt that it's an issue of technical ability. So the only reasonable assumption for me is that it is a conscious decision by GOG not to offer this sorting option. The only question is: why?

But how many people utilize magog? Also, I don't think magog uses GOG's site for each search. I'm pretty sure it uses a local DB, which it updates every hour, or was it once a day(I can't remember). I'd imagine that's why it is able to add this extra functionality.

Clearly the additional sorting would require just enough extra CPU usage to slow the overall response time of the GOG servers, thus feeling sluggish.

I know STEAM allows sorting, but on big sales that ends up taking 3-5 seconds to complete. If it completes at all, since it often fails to load, requiring a refresh and then you have to reselect the sorting by price. Maybe the GOG team fells that as being unacceptable.

Why can‘t the „sort by price“ be automatically updated, when one of the „price tags“ is changed? How often does that happen?
- new game added
- some kind of sale (or simply the price if one or more games change)
- change of currency exchange rates
and inbetween nothing changes and nothing needs to be updated. If you add a trigger to the „price“ database column (or is it row?) and just update that then and your users get to see the resulting „static“ table?

Do I now get a job at GOG???

I hope so! :-)

At least if the problem really is that GOG can't update their database in a sensible way, then it would be good to hire someone who can!

But as I said, I rather suspect that it is a deliberate decision on the part of GOG not to offer this sorting option and I hope that some blue will be willing to explain what the reason for this decision was.

We used to have an option for finding free games, demos and DLC. We no longer have that.

In any case the sorting options are strange at the moment and raise a few more questions:

-what does popularity mean? It can't be user-rating or number of sales, because those are separate sorting categories.
-what are 'newest/oldest first'? We have 'date added' (the date the games were added to GOG), so is 'newest/oldest' supposed to refer to the original release date of the game? If that's the case, those two sorting options don't work. Try it. 'Oldest first' starts with Hitman 2, The Void and FEAR 2. ... there are definitely older games on GOG! Conversely 'newest first' starts with Earthlock, Fields of Glory 2 and Hegemony 3

Hmmm. Perhaps I spoke to soon with my confidence that it isn't lacking database skills that prevent the sorting by price. :-)
That's still there for me. Under filters in the left column. Filter by price --> Free

And they still haven't fixed alphabetical sorting...

Ah, thanks. I was on the "on sale" tab... those options go away there. Thanks for the heads up.

Definitely a very fair question. I've been wondering this for years now and there are many times where I visited the site during a major sale promotion and didn't want to wade through hundreds of games to try to find any ultra-deals that I couldn't pass up so ended up just closing the page and missing out on whatever I wasn't aware of. There are probably dozens of games I'd have bought in the past and/or would buy in the future if only I could sort the store catalogue by price with filters etc.

I can't see any reason why they would purposefully NOT add this option as it would only stand to provide customers a useful mechanism to help them give GOG more of their money. I can only surmise that it comes down to prioritization of features based on limited development resources and perceived cost to benefit versus other improvements that the resources could be allocated to at a given time.

That is the only reason that makes any logical sense to me anyway.

It's not a matter of whether someone can still look for deals and spend more time or not either, it's a matter of providing customers with conveniences to maximize their likelihood of going ahead with a purchase. One can claim a customer is "lazy" but it is GOG that misses out on the sale in the end.

There are tonnes of games I'd buy on sale for < $3 that I don't really even want for example, but would get them anyway just because it'd be so cheap. They're not worth taking time to search for every time a sale happens, but if they were easily thrown in my face with a couple clicks I'd toss down the coin. I know others who would do the same also. I often buy games on Steam and its resellers this very way. I go to the browse-games page, filter out software and DLC to only show games, then go through the list from cheapest to $5 or so to see any super cheap deals that come up including games I never heard of. I make opportunistic whimsical buys this way of things I'd never otherwise buy. No easy way to do that on GOG that I'm aware of. The closest way is using a 3rd party website to search and sort the GOG game database which isn't the most convenient.

Hopefully they decide to add the option in the future and join the ranks of virtually every other online game retailer. :) Then again, hopefully they don't do that as my wallet would start to hurt. :)

Thanks. Now I feel a lot better. :-)

I would really like to know why there is no such option. Can't be to hard to explain and even if it is "we have no time to implement" or "we have no expertise".

And while we are at the sorting "thing". I'd like to ask for an option "highest discount". That would be great.