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From my point of view, the main purpose of GOG Galaxy is to launch games. The way I use it is that I open GOG Galaxy, look for a game I want to play, then launch the game. That's the main purpose. There might be other things that are nice to do, like rate stuff, or see what friends are doing, or buy new games, or whatever - but the core thing is that I want to launch games.

With that in mind, GOG Galaxy 1 was better, because I could double-click to launch a game. In the current beta, if I click a game (or try to double-click) it opens a full-screen overview and I have to look for the 'play' button at the top. The overview could be interesting sometimes; but the vast majority of cases I don't really need to see a description of the game, or rate it, or see my recent activity (especially since the activity section isn't currently working). In almost every case, I just want to play the game.

So my suggestion is that a single click on the game should simply select it (and selecting it could then be used to add tags, or drag it somewhere maybe or whatever). Double-click should launch it. And the overview screen could be a separate button which appears next to the game when it is selected, and can also be accessed with right-click.

Alternatively, it could remain as it is now but with a very short delay before opening the overview screen - so that it was still possible to double-click to launch.

Again, the most common thing I want to do is launch the game, and so I'd like that to be the easiest thing to do.
Post edited January 15, 2020 by blind3rdeye
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blind3rdeye: From my point of view, the main purpose of GOG Galaxy is to launch games. The way I use it is that I open GOG Galaxy, look for a game I want to play, then launch the game. That's the main purpose. There might be other things that are nice to do, like rate stuff, or see what friends are doing, or buy new games, or whatever - but the core thing is that I want to launch games.

With that in mind, GOG Galaxy 1 was better, because I could double-click to launch a game. In the current beta, if I click a game (or try to double-click) it opens a full-screen overview and I have to look for the 'play' button at the top. The overview could be interesting sometimes; but the vast majority of cases I don't really need to see a description of the game, or rate it, or see my recent activity (especially since the activity section isn't currently working). In almost every case, I just want to play the game.

So my suggestion is that a single click on the game should simply select it (and selecting it could then be used to add tags, or drag it somewhere maybe or whatever). Double-click should launch it. And the overview screen could be a separate button which appears next to the game when it is selected, and can also be accessed with right-click.

Alternatively, it could remain as it is now but with a very short delay before opening the overview screen - so that it was still possible to double-click to launch.

Again, the most common thing I want to do is launch the game, and so I'd like that to be the easiest thing to do.
While still not ideal, you can customize the grid view, by adding the status, which will give you a small icon below the games cover, which offers "one click to run"
Double clicking a bookmarked game on the left panel will also launch it.
To bookmark a game, you have to enter its gameview and press the bookmark icon, pic related.
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Those are both useful things that I didn't know about. Thanks for that.

I still think there's some room for improvement on this though. I still reckon either of my other two suggestions would be good. (And the idea of the mini-delay for double-click would be a relatively small change in terms of user-experience.)

I'm now going to go through and bookmark 6 or so games that I've been playing recently... but it occurs to me that that's pretty much always what I want to do: ie. bookmark games that I've been playing recently. So here's another suggestion: the 'recent' button in the left panel could include a collapsible list of recent games. Similarly for the 'installed' button. (I'm just throwing around ideas here. I don't know what the best option is.)

Finally, on the topic of the 'recent' button. I notice that when I click 'recent' it shows me three games I've played recently, and 4 games that 'others' have played. To be honest, I rarely care what others have played. Some days I might be interested, but most of the time that's not what I'm looking for. Can we make the division between "recent by me" and "recent by others" adjustable? So instead of 3 & 4, we could have 5 and 2; or whatever. (I've seen that the number of changes automatically adjusts with the size of the window; but the 'others' section is always larger. As I change the size, I get [2,4], [3,4], [3,5], [4,5].)
+1 for your final suggestion. We need to configure the recent view to include only things, we really want to see.
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blind3rdeye: Double-click should launch it.
Actually, in grid view, you can right click on the game and select 'Play' directly. Wouldn't that be easier?
Just a quick update.

I've been using DerBesserwisser's suggestion (ie. the the 'status' icon in grid view for one-click run). It works pretty well, so I'm reasonably happy with that. But I still have two further suggestions:

1) I think having the game name and the status icon in grid view should be the default. (It's not very important, because it's easy to change anyway, but I think its good to make the default as user-friendly as possible. The single-click run is good; and the game name is also good since not all box-art has easy-to-read names.)

2) When you launch a game, it would be nice to have some kind of visual indicator to show that it is launching. Sometimes it takes a few seconds between clicking 'run' and actually seeing anything happen on the screen. In that time I sometimes wonder if it is actually working. eg. maybe I misclicked or something. So I think it would be good if GOG Galaxy changed somehow to show that it was launching. eg. the run button could change to something that says or indicates "launching"; or the background colour could change, or something like that.
Hi, after the last update Double clicking a bookmarked game on the left panel, does not work anymore. Please fix it.

Thanks