Just pointing this out quickly. Any hope for pages instead of infinite scrolling on catalog and wishlist? :)

It goes against the current design trend. Basically the current view is not that users should be able to page through loads of content, more that they should be able to correctly filter that content to what they want. So the paging thing, though established, is really not that good an idiom. Have you ever tried going to Google's 1001th page of a search query. You would have to change the query string because no-one would page that far, but I think you'll find they tell you to piss off.

So no, GOG should not introduce paging, they should enable better filtering.

If you're having to go to the 100th page in Google then you're doing something wrong. Rarely are useful search results on even the 10th page.

Paging serves a useful purpose in that it allows people to just browse like they would at a shop. Sometimes you don't know what you want, and pages are great for that. With the filtering paradigm, there are things that you might like, but never get the chance to like as they get hidden and aren't noticeable unless you choose the right filter.

As for current design trends, the current design trends are to have pretty interfaces that are complete pants when it comes to usability. I know that usability is hard to really nail down, but there's so much emphasis on being new and cool that a lot of the designers seem to forget about why things were established. Pages were established in part because that was the best we could do at the time and in part because it allows people to conveniently remember where they found it in relation to other items.

To be honest there are a lot of tiny things that I find annoying about GOG's website. Not that it's terrible or anything like that but maybe it's just been added to slowly over time so annoyances cumulate. I get the impression that some of the underlying techy stuff needs a bit of a spring clean.

I'm hopeful that there will be a bit of a redesign next year (the blues have hinted at it).

Well, the "current design trends" thing was a bit tongue in cheek, I don't like a lot of the trends right now (I'm currently working on a "Metro" styled app, I hate it, everyone else seems to like it). However you're kind of agreeing with my point there with the google thing, if you need to page you're doing it wrong.

Paging was introduced during times of lower bandwidth, it wasn't so that customers could organise stuff, it was so that the browser didn't get hit with a massive webpage size.

I'm not saying that GOG have it nailed design wise, but paging wouldn't help. I like to be able to move up and down the list without changing it. Perhaps a more lightweight list view would help, or maybe a better sorting feature. My experience of paging (apart from being hell to actually implement) is that it just muddies the waters for the other features. If you go to page 10 of a list, then you sort or filter the list differently, are you still on page 10? They may no longer be a page 10. The fact is you've got a lump of data you need to interrogate and splitting it up is not natural to the way people think.

Solution: death to the tablet design on pc!
Long list should be allowed and advanced filters\sorting should be always possible.

Well, allow for all entries on one page too, definitely, but as long as they're loaded right away instead of needing to scroll through them bit by bit just so they'll load. You may find that even current browsers will stutter a bit when there are several hundred entries though, though I imagine less so than they do after needing to script-load all those hundreds bit by bit to get there.

As for filtering, sure, the catalog needs filters for specific genre(s) (and likely even genre combinations, possibly including perspective, whatever shows up on the gamecard), specific release year or year range, specific price or price range, possibly a search function for the developer / publisher lists (as in, should be separate ones). But it's a shop, so unlike Google where you're likely looking for something specific, you may just want to browse, in which case any filters may hurt you.
(Reordering a paged list when you're not on page 1 should take you to page 1 though, that should be standard. It makes no sense to stay on the page you were. Not that any sites I know of do that...)

Not sure what advanced filtering you could do for the wishlist though, it's quite a mess as it is.

The long scroll becomes more manageable, and quicker, if you browse by genre.

The problem with that is that certain games get lumped with some rather odd genre choices, while others have no real classification whatsoever so those get thrown in god-knows-where. It's definitely possible to miss some titles because of that and/or see games pop up repeatedly in categories in which they obviously don't belong.

The way the infinite-scrolling catalogue here works is that the page requests a snippet of HTML whenever you scroll down a little and get to the bottom. It's kind of a pet peeve of mine. If the server just sent a JSON list of the data for the entire catalogue and left the browser to add DOM nodes itself as it gets the list then it would be faster and more efficient, and eliminate the need for the infinite-scrolling thingy. The thumbnails can still be deferred until they're visible, but the entire list should be added in one go instead of broken into multiple requests.

Also infinite scrolling makes browsers' search feature entirely useless because until all of the content is visible you can't search it. This has happened to me many times on gog while trying to find something for a contest.

I'm not an UI guru, though I am a web developer who has to take UI into consideration and I HATE their new design.

Sometimes, I just want to peruse through their entire catalog for various reasons (top amongst those is looking for interesting games that I don't have) and it is nowhere near 100 pages long.

The 100th page on a Google search is unlikely to be pertinent, but all games in GOG's catalog are.

Pages may not be the most elegant solution, but IMO the scrolling bit by bit trend is even worse. Let's take the wishlist, for example. Supposing I wanted to know what's at the bottom of the list, or what's item no. 500 on it - what do you think would be the quicker and easier way to find this out, using numbered pages (like the forum does) or scrolling bit by bit?

The former allows you to navigate comparatively fast and precisely if well done, while the latter has you clicking and waiting, clicking and waiting, clicking and cursing that you have to start over if you clicked on the wrong thing, just like the cartoon says.

The vertical scrolling "trendy web look" thing is awful. And I thought I hated iPhone gradients. This is worse.