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Xbox Live Marketplace Unfit for Current Content Load, Says Microsoft
by Aaron Linde, Jun 04, 2008 1:25pm PDTXbox 360 product manager Aaron Greenberg says that Microsoft is unsatisfied with Xbox Live's interface, particularly in the ways in which it allows customers to search within the Xbox Live Marketplace's swiftly growing selection of content.
"I think that we are not, I would say... happy with the ability to find and discover content as easily as we'd like for consumers to be able to do that," Greenberg told MTV Multiplayer.
Greenberg said that Xbox Live's interface was never intended to serve the amount of content that the platform currently offers. The steady stream of new downloadable items such as games, new content and videos recently prompted Microsoft to consider delisting underperforming Xbox Live Arcade titles.
"I think a lot of that is we built Xbox Live Marketplace for a few hundred items and now we have 17,000 items," Greenberg added. "We built a small store and we filled it with lots of lots of stuff. We're feeling some of these growing pains and [the new policy] is one of those tradeoffs we've had to make."
Greenberg went on to suggest that the last major update to the Xbox Live Marketplace's interface, which arrived as part of an Xbox 360 dashboard update last fall, wasn't enough to solve the problem. Though the manager would not specify whether or not a complete overhaul is in the cards, he noted that some upcoming changes should ease the bloat.
"Longer term, we're looking to make the ability to find content and organize the 17,000 pieces of content we have a lot better."
Comments
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If they want to get really fancy, show the games your friends own (and if they're playing anything at the moment as a bonus) and a recommendation system, so if you bought say Assault Heroes 1, the system would highlight the sequel instead of something in a genre you haven't played before.
One thing that really bugs me now is that the Rock Band DLC descriptions because the screen never scrolls down enough to revel the important info like whether it's a cover or not.
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Can't say that I agree with all of it, especially the "it's probably too late for them to recover" part, but food for thought. I don't think MS will ever consider trying to get out of the way (from between you and the content you want) and just be a transparent aggregator, but they could do a lot with a redesign of their console interface and web-integrated XBLM access.
the chatboad is all kinds of awesome
It isn't, "We don't have enough stuff for our store."
It isn't, "We only have a couple of hundred items, but it's still hard for people to find what they're looking for."
It's "we have 17,000 different things in the store, so people are having a hard time finding what they're looking for."
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Looking at the competition's store interfaces, though, they're still ahead despite having more stuff on their service.
Rockband certainly went in the right direction with their in-game music store, and I kind of figured a lot of the new games would probably follow suit. To see the Xbox team wanting to address this problem is assuring though. They may keep my gold subscription...for now.
I'm sure the player base has plenty of good feedback on what they'd like to see. It would be nice if the Xbox team provided an interface for those suggestions to be submitted.