I was sharing the deal from yesterday with a friend but they didn’t visit the site until after the deal had ended, which caused confusion because the website has changed. Do you have anything planned to allow deals to be linked directly, so that if a deal has ended then the visitor is informed they’ve missed out rather than shown a different deal? For example visiting chrono.gg might redirect to the current deal (eg: chrono.gg/warhammer) and then any links shared will always be to the same deal.
This also ties into this post from TotalBiscuit, they talk about integrity and how “we are able to choose specifically which games we promote” however if they share a link to chrono.gg today and someone clicks on it tomorrow they’ll see a game that isn’t necessarily supported by TotalBiscuit, which the visitor might not understand.
Sorry, to clarify, I mean that once a deal has ended it disappears from the website forever which means any previous links made are now “wrong” which is confusing for people unfamiliar with chrono. For example yesterday I sent someone a link to chrono.gg so they could purchase Banner Saga but they didn’t click on the link until today, and now the site is showing a different game, and they thought they had done something wrong because they couldn’t find Banner Saga (until they worked out what chrono is).
If the links were to a specific page (like, chrono.gg/bannersaga which showed “Sorry the daily deal for Banner Saga has ended”) it would clear up any confusion.
During development we considered having past deals stick around so people could see them, but we decided against it for a few reasons. One, and the most important in our opinion, is that it takes away a bit of the simplicity of the site for users. It’s likely minor, but we really want the enter experience to be super simple. Having pages with past deals that aren’t able to be purchased creates some extra mental overhead that we’d rather avoid. The second reason is that implementing that system would’ve required a non-insignificant amount of work. We’re a small team, and since it didn’t exactly align with our goals, we didn’t want to put that on our plate.
All that being said, I think this is a totally fair critique. Transparency and integrity is very important to us, so we’ll definitely continue to think about this.
I see, that makes total sense, the simplicity of the site is great. A potential middle ground might be to have unique URLs for each deal but once a deal ends the URL redirects to the homepage with a boilerplate message explaining the deal has ended and the deal they’re seeing is a new deal. That said I’ll be more clear about what chrono.gg is when sharing links and that should alleviate most confusion, and I guess once the site is well established brand recognition will clear up any confusion.
P.S. it’s super cool to see what you’ve achieved already with the site, it’s beautiful. MCF misses you
