DriveThruRPG is one of the biggest forces in the tabletop gaming world. It’s a huge eCommerce site where people can buy digital copies of RPGs, but it hasn’t had much in the way of a design overhaul for many years.
Now visitors on the homepage are offered a link to a “facelift preview”, which happens to use the preview subdomain too.
We’re told it’s a desktop-only preview, but you can access it on your smartphone, and that’s one way to see a big change. The site is far cleaner and with larger tap targets to make it easier to navigate without keyboard and mouse.
The new DriveThruRPG embraces sideways scrolling, both for hero banners in a carousel and for products.
Not all the page templates have been updated and in particular individual product pages are yet to be published to the preview server. However, you can see publisher pages.
The new design takes publishers’ own product category banners and raises them to the top of the site. I imagine this will encourage publishers to spend a little more money on designs for them.
This tweak will help larger publishers who may have different RPG lines and will be keen that customers can quickly get to the right ones.
These sub-brands are also easier to get to via the Refine and Rule System buttons.
The same filter technique is used on the Format button too, with OBS’s Phone PDF format given appropriate placement. It’s also a handy reminder that you can buy epub documents from DriveThruRPG as you can STL files for 3D printing and virtual tabletop integrations.
The convergence of virtual tabletops and digital marketplaces is on the cards, and just last week DriveThruRPG announced phase 1 of their integration with partner Astral Tabletop.
What do you think of the new DriveThruRPG?
As long as we can continue using lists and not those useless and fancy carrousels.
More useful for me would be to avoid showing the ones I already have in the account, as I don’t need to see them if I already have them.