[Japo]

The website was remade at the same time and as part of the deal when Kosta sold it, so it became as broken as this at that time, and the very moment the deed was done, no more work would ever be allowed for developing bug fixes or enhancements. The buyer was not Abovo but another company called Studentis, iirc also Swedish. A couple of years later Studentis went bust and Abovo bought it out, or something like that, it could've been just a rebranding, I don't know the legal details.

Afaik they wanted to remake the website because it was considered dated and the new one would be an improvement. The only things wrong with the old website were: content management was too manual; and the layout didn't scale to wide screens. And it looked old/retro, as opposed to this "nice" white-on-white theme we now enjoy. But this website doesn't scale wide either -- which is of course an opportunity to stylishly cram ads to the right. And the attempt to build a proper content management system based on Drupal was apparently aborted early, so we now have at least as much manual file management work, and many more bugs and pitfalls.

People have been leaving continuously, long before and after these events, more or less regardless of them. It is normal and expectable that people leave. The reason why the community has shrunk is because there haven't been enough replacements. Part of that can of course be blamed on the bad state of the website, but it's likely also because many fewer people are now interested in abandonware. The games that still fall in our turf amd haven't been taken by GOG.com are now too old to generate traffic.