First i would please quickly dismiss the annoying horde of patronizing people who would quickly jump on me to lecture me as inblah blah blah, change is good, damn old geezers who cant stand changes and always complain about it should just adapt and keep quiet - polite version of SFTU - or get lost - old school way of nowaday's die from cancer, scum, as we see on internet. I would respectfully direct you to go back to watching the world through the tiny 6-7 inches large screens of your life-proxy devices, thank you... We all know the world revolve around you and catter to you already, so no need to get bragging more...
So, NO, not every change is good and to be embraced... A change need to answer to a gap or problem that was there before, the need of evolution is to improve oneself and, yes, adapt to the surrounding, which here is making me seriously question exactly what GOG has in mind, and the way GOG folks are perceiving their surrounding and their userbase.
Let me put it straight: the point of a store is to SELL things. Pretty blunt, i admit, and it may shattrs your illusions but it's the boiled down truth of is. You can sugarcoat it with any "value" or "community feeling" or "user experience" PR/marketing crap as you want, in the end, it's to sell.
To whom does a store sell things ? To CUSTOMERS ! Oh, shocking revelation ! This money doesnt come magically from anonymous numbers or by itself on the GOG Vault ! It comes from us and our purses, and that's who we are: customers, and so, human beings.
My main problem(s) with the current GOG website revamping (yet another one, always in same wrong direction: aka "away from users/customers" and "straight into frontal clash with Steam, which shall neither be seen as a competitor, frankly, nor as a model to follow... Because it's as if a family oldschool home cooking restaurant or a star-chief gastronomic one would see MacDonald or BurgerKing as their direct competitor to push themselves on par with...)
1) The game page
Before the revamping, you had exactly every useful pieces of information a customer could need to at least catch their own interest and keep digging on the store page a little further and consider buying a game already: a trailer, a few promopics (easy to link anywhere else for "spreading the word" purpose among known friends/people), details on game release time, devs and publisher names, price of course, and minimum technical requirements to run the game, and community global rating of the game... All on a single glance on a single widescreen page.
Now what we have: Partial view of a trailer or of a cover art (depending on the game), bunche of promopics with a typical embedded "gallery/pic display engine script" (and they are now not easy to link, but it was probably the point), community rating and a big big big BUY button (i mean: 8 time as big as previously), probably all of that meant for phone and tablet use... For a store that sells... Computer games !
Oh, you wanted to know trivial useless things like if your machine can run it, who publishes it or develop it, which additional languages it does support, as well as possible additional features like controller support, cloud saving (for those using galaxy) or such ? you'll have to dig down with one or two more mousewheel scrolls at least 'or a gentle finger touch maybe :) )
And the user reviews are on the very bottom now, but at least finally they are sortable...
(hey, a GREAT idea for you to "improve user experience" even further in the brickwalled/darkpit destination you seem to be willing to drive to: while you are at it, directly make the trailer to autolaunch and play each time you visit the game page, and of course, make it a behavior not possible to turn off or set in personal preferences of course, Proud GOG way all along !)
2) The front page:
Why putting the "news headlines" back to the bottom of the page ? I mean, the concept of "news" is to be seen quickly, right ?
At least the block of "popular/new/upcoming" wasnt removed, but it now shares the space with a new block of "curated collections". If you are into making "moder UI" stuff or "adaptive webdesign", then use AJAX of similar technology to let the user rearrange the different UI blocks of the webpage according to THEIR need. And/or have some of the blocks togglable on/off through personnal settings at least.
I am obviously upset and fed up at this patronizing and infantilizing attitude stores like GOG or others do have in presomptuously assuming what is good for their users/customers in place of themselves. We are grow up adults with payment methods, we ought to have by now earned the right of stop being treated like kids by "goodythiking" parents who know what's best for us, thank you ! So, give us CHOICE, give us CUSTOMIZATION, give us the way to decide for ourselves what is our BEST user experience according to OUR needs and standards, instead of shoveling YOUR own best vision of "user experience" down your throat... Choose a default one, sure, for people who dont care or dont want to bother, but stopp treating each and every of us as if we were undecided and clueless children !
Oh, and still: no "hide owned games from the store" toggable setting, again..
With each revamping, or as you call it, each "improvement" to the website UI, you make the whole task of shopping through your store an endlessly growingly tedious and timewasting CHORE ! Is it as if you decided we had to SUFFER to earn the glorious right to give you our money ! Purchasing here should be easy and troublefree, not an epic struggle !
Oh, and stop trying to mimic Steam... If we were wanting to purchase on Steam according to their brilliant layout, we would already be purchasing there, DRM or not... But i'm confident in GOG that you would finally one day come up with a final evoluted form of Web UI that will make our time here so troublesome that it will outweight the mere benefit of having games that are DRM free (if such "key feature" of yours had not disappeared in between)
TL;DR: No, change for the sake of change or to impose an arbitrary vision of "what is the best user experience for you" while treating your customers as clueless and undecided children of yours as a goodthinking parent is NOT afaic a healthy way of treating your customers. Any web ui/layout change should go towards more customer-friendly ease of use, 1st glance information gathering and painless browsing with no troublesome or timewasting chore-like feeling; not cattering to mobile platform browsing (i mean... dudes... you are selling PC games ! We have displays way bigger than 7" screens thank you)
But as said in the beginning of the message, i hear the galoping rumble of the horde of toxic fanboys and hate bandwagon...
