Microsoft Unhappy with Marketplace Design

Microsoft's product management director has been frustrated with Xbox Live's ability to organize content.

As the Xbox Live Arcade list is in the pruning process, Microsoft is faced with the reality that the Xbox Live Marketplace is not optimized to smoothly scale with increasing content.

Product Management Director Aaron Greenberg admitted to MTV's Multiplayer blog, "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."

The problem of having many items listed on one page in a simple drop-down list became apparent once the catalog got large enough.

"I think a lot of that is we built Xbox Live Marketplace for a few hundred items and now we have 17,000 items," explained Greenberg. "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."

Without confirming a redone interface, Greenberg asserted that these problems would soon be addressed.

He stated, "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."