Hi everyone at Epic,
I was browsing on the marketplace and sadly it has already started to feel cramped, to the point I was losing attention while staring at the thumbnails.
The design right now is not scalable, and the scariest part is that it’s starting to look like the apple app store.
Without proper search schemes and ranking (either epic driven and user generated) content is lost, and categories just help slightly.
Also would be good looking at curated content like steam is doing lately. The marketplace is a tool for people by people, feels natural to empower people.
If content discovery is not tackled now i think this will backfire to the marketplace as a whole, because losing trust from customers takes just one bad move but regaining it takes a hell lot more effort.
And this takes me to one of the main underlying problems: page size. Launcher’s fixed size is a very poor limit.
What are your plans for this? Is there an ongoing discussion on design and UX? Any place in which people can interact and suggest on the matter?
Thanks.
We are hoping to share our short term plans with improving the marketplace UX soon. Some of the first areas we’re tackling are adding search/filtering features along with improving the over layout and categorization. Feedback features such as comments and ratings are coming as well. I don’t have the concrete timeline of when all of this will come online yet, although I expect we can share that soon, and since this all lives in the launcher we’ll be able push updates much quicker (instead of waiting until the next engine version).
Good to hear. The marketplace is one of the very few fields where you should look to unity for inspiration.
Also: The launcher has an insane memory leak (2-3GB memory usage), so as it stands it really falls out of the whole workflow (close and forget, every morning when I start hacking away…)
That’s good!
+1 to the memory leak, I totally get that ram is not that pricy these days but a launcher app cannot eat as much memory as NUKE or AE on just opening!
Waiting for the roadmap.
The memory leak should be fixed with the most recent Launcher update.