Personally i’m very against this change, i think the 16:9 tiles are really stupid and make everything feel and look a lot clunkier than it used to be, and i can make one comparison of a good way to do something like this.
Take this Wayback Machine screenshot of the 2013 games page, note how everything was also a 16:9 tile back then too! with one key difference… and i’ll get onto that in a little
It displays the player count at the bottom left, some relevant gear/genre info at the bottom right (which could be replaced with something else since those aren’t very relevant anymore), and best of all (the key difference i mentioned earlier), everything was vertically padded a good bit so it didn’t look so cluttered! not to mention the extra info when you hovered over, like displaying the creator, all time visits, favorites and last updated date! and all of this worked without it feeling too clunky, not to mention that this was also before developers were told to make game icons for their games so they look better on discovery / home pages, so everyone already had main thumbnails that satisfied the whole “this is your game’s first impression” deal that they want us to go back to now, but the problem is that there is a chance that this one might not be the first impression someone sees, as it will vary depending on how and where you find the game. While scrolling through a little to test the waters with the discovery i just found myself confused and a little bit visually overwhelmed by how crammed together everything felt.
Also, getting onto the 16:9 tiles individually as opposed to comparing them to the 2013 version, these ones, apart from feeling clunky and crammed together, also feel very slow to cycle through due to the (way more delayed than it should be) highlight effect, the effect also goes into its neighboring tiles, extending its “click-off” zone to whenever your mouse either leaves the highlight or goes into the smaller initial click-in zone of the next tile, for which another slow highlight plays.
Personally i’m very against this change, i was already pretty meh on it for consoles but at least there it makes sense since you need to be able to see what you can see a lot clearer since one usually sits further away from the screen than on a computer, but the change for desktop just seems very dumb and misguided,
I’ll also compare them to youtube tiles, who have been doing the 16:9 format for as long as i can remember, here’s a photo!
look at how much info they can fit into one tile! and just to compare the padding, i’ll post a 4 tile screenshot showing similarly to what roblox could show in 4 tiles
Wow! it doesn’t look that cluttered! its the beauty of just making the things a little more vertically padded, just like they did back in 2013! (and they also managed to put the type of info that roblox had hidden in the 2013 screenshot without having it hidden!), sure in retrospect the vertical padding on the roblox homepage is not too bad, but i can’t help but feel like it still looks very cluttered even after looking at it for a little while longer, while comparing for this post, i still feel like this is a very misguided and useless effort that does a lot more harm than good, adding to it the removal of the player count display, but i’ve already talked about that to great lengths before and i won’t get into that again, that’s really all i had to say for this very lengthy devforum reply that will likely get burried deep in the comment thread and won’t be checked out by many more people, oh well!
