Taking a Look at the New GOG.com

In the span of a single week, game delivery service GOG.com went from being shut down due to various reasons to being relaunched with a slew of new features enabled. Of course, the shutting down part was nothing more than a hoax, and a very poorly executed one if you ask me. Despite that, though, it’s good to see the service survive, since it’s a good one.

With the launch came the removal of the “Beta” tag, and a couple of new features. I decided to check out the service in some depth over the weekend, to see just how useful these new features are. As mentioned in some of GOG.com’s YouTube videos from last week, perhaps the biggest change made to the site is one that users won’t even see, since it has to do with backend optimization. According to the company, about 98% of the code was rewritten, ensuring smooth performance even with vast user growth.

For regulars, the most noticeable change is the front page, with an overall cleaner look. The top half of the page shows a games ticker of sorts, promoting certain titles, while the bottom half is split into two sections. On the left is the news section, which seems to include more topics than before, and also involving the community a bit more, while the right side can be used to browse games.

A new feature that requires the community to be a success is “GOGmix”, a tool that allows people to build a playlist of sorts, which aims to help those looking for suggestions. On any game page, you can click a button to begin creating a GOGmix, or view current GOGmix’s that feature that particular title. So far, the GOGmix feature seems to have gotten some good response, with “GOG’s starter mix” being one of the best received.

The new GOG.com does bring some interesting things to the table, but I can’t help but feel a little underwhelmed given the hassle and uncertainty the company caused last week. Nothing here screams out as me as being worthy of such events, and really, the site feels like it’s experienced a normal evolution, not a revolution. Either way, GOG.com is here to stay, and to that, I say “woot!”.

Many of you are really pleased with the brand new GOG.com and its features, which is quite nice we must say :). Our Dev&Design team has put a lot of their work into rewriting 98% of the site’s code and we’re happy lots of GOG users appreciate it. If you still didn’t discover all the new features that GOG has for you, we have prepared an overview page with the main new features. We’d like to know what’s a fancy feature for you and what should be improved or changed. Let us know how do you like all the new features of the brand new GOG.com in this thread.