New Game Pages

Most of you probably didn’t even notice, but we actually changed up the design for game pages. Mwahaha!

What changed? Well, game pages now have 2 columns, enabling devlog posts to scroll…forever. Meta!

Since devlogs have become one of the most used features on Game Jolt by both developers and gamers, we made them more visible, and a primary focus of game pages.

This has the added benefit of finally allowing us to merge the devlog and games pages to use the same exact layout and design.

Game Ratings

Probably the biggest systems change we’ve done in a long time. The old 5-star rating system has been replaced with a thumbs up/down system. We only publicly show the number of likes a game has received now, and don’t show the number of dislikes. Whether or not you bought a paid game, you can still Like or Dislike it, as well. Previous ratings of 1-2 were changed to dislike, and ratings from 3-5 changed to a like.

There are many reasons we made this switch, so let’s explain some of them:

Devlogs. The 5-star rating system we had before didn’t allow rating of games that were devlog-only. Since you couldn’t play the game, there was no way you could give it a valid rating score. There are many devlogs that I’m a huge fan of. I should be able to show support with a Like. There are also devlogs that I’d rather not see, and now I can dislike them to clean up my recommendations.

What is a 3? No matter what labels you assign to different numbers of a rating system, people will have varying thoughts about what each score value actually means. Like/dislike is pretty straightforward for most people.

Easier. Like/dislike is way easier to think about conceptually, requiring less mental energy. We believe this will result in more ratings and more data that we can work with for games, enabling us to show you better games you might like.

Browsing. With the same rating data across games and devlog-only pages, we will finally be able to merge the game listings with the devlog listings again. This will simplify searching for project pages across the site, as well as making it simpler for us to manage.

Sticky. Ratings are no longer reset when you launch your game. Why? Because chances are the people that liked your game while it was just a devlog or early-access game, will still like your game after launch. And if they don’t? Well, they can just change it to a dislike if they really want to.

Reviews. And last, but definitely not least, we are working on a much better “review” system that will allow you to leave longer reviews with more detailed ratings and thoughts. We have some other changes to do before that’s possible, but it’s getting close!

Comments

You can now dislike comments to help us figure out which comments may be unhelpful or abusive. Similar to game likes/dislikes, we don’t show how many people disliked a comment. Only the likes are shown.

With this new data we were able to make new tabs for sorting comments. Here’s a breakdown:

Hot More recent comments sorted by the number of likes they’ve received.

Top All time most liked comments.

New Sorted strictly by time, newest first.

You Comments you’ve posted.

The default sort has changed to Hot instead of New.

This is actually a great way to do AMAs for your game, as you’re now able to pick the Top comments to answer.

So, who liked your…

Comments, games and posts?

It’s important to see who is interacting with your content and games. You can now see who is scooping what you’re pooping. Simply click the like counts across the site, and it’ll pop up a modal for you to scroll though and see all those beautiful people.