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Option to show game preview (description start, screenshots, videos) when hovering game thumbnails on creator page and collections

A topic by komehara created May 05, 2024 Views: 205
Viewing posts 1 to 1

I thought I had already suggested this somewhere but I can’t find the post, so I’m opening a new one.

As usual I’ll post in this thread first for discussion, then open a feature request on GitHub later if I get a clearer idea on the implementation (or on the opposite if I need more input from the devs).

This is the hover preview we get from usual browsing:

image.png

It contains the start of the description, screenshots and videos. It also plays the thumbnail as gif if it is one.

On the contrary, on a creator’s main page and on collections, hovering only plays the thumbnail GIF if any.

It does make sense as people on a profile or collection are more likely to click to learn more than people randomly browsing many games. However, sometimes there are many titles and I want to get a quick idea of what each looks like (and most thumbnails show a title, not an ingame screenshot). So it would be nice to have an option, either on user side or on creator side, to show previews of games on hover also on creator and collection pages.

I suppose it’d be better on user side to give them the choice, and so we don’t have to request all creators to enable it if the new option is not true by default. I would make the user-side option set to show preview on hover by default anyway, as it’s generally better to demonstrate new features then let users disable them so they don’t go under the radar (unless it’s really annoying for some people - in that case we can just make an announcement and prompt people to choose their setting immediately - we could reuse the notification system for this, but I don’t think a public announcement system exists on itch.io yet, would be a nice addition).

Alternatively we could embed a button to Disable hover preview (on creator page / on collection) directly under the Watch Trailer button of the popup. This way users can disable the setting for each kind of page immediately, but still reenable it in their preferences.

P.S.: not sure about the difference between Idea and Suggestion, but this is quite precise now so I set it as Suggestion