Thanks for all the feedback everyone.
Regarding the favourite games menu, I agree that the large tiles looked nice, but it meant that we were limited to having 12 favourites. The UI also caused problems at smaller screen sizes, hiding 2 games behind a carousel which required you to scroll to view them. The new view means we can double the amount of games favourited and it scales better across all screen sizes. We can also show more of the game name and columns are easier to scan than horizontal rows (tradeoff being the smaller image). I appreciate that this is a big visual change which will take a while to get used to.
I’ll re-iterate the rationale I posted earlier in a thread about the close “x” button — I understand that it seems unnecessary for you and others who are used to browsing the site and understand this pattern. But for people who don't realise that clicking into a game will suddenly filter all content through it, the 'x' indicates that a temporary filter has been applied and can be dismissed (similar to how reddit show search is being filtered). It's easy to forget that some people don't realise this has happened and when they do, don't know that clicking the logo to go home dismisses it. Functionally, the navigation behaves as it did before, but this tweak made it clearer to understand with the people we tested with.
An improvement we're exploring would be that when you click the "x", we keep you on the page you're viewing and remove the filter rather than navigate you back to the home page. There are some technical challenges around doing this that we're working through.