As many of you know, our support team constantly collects your suggestions. We use that feedback as the basis for gradual software upgrades. During the last year and a half, our development team has been busy working on an ambitious task of creating a brand new generation of Marketplace.
View Marketplace Live Trailer 
We Have Been Listening. On numerous occasions, you have encouraged us to match the high level of realism that our simulation already demonstrates under the hood with the same realism on the outside. You wanted a more realistic method for the students to input their decisions and investigate their results. It quickly became obvious that in order to achieve that, it was time to make Marketplace more visual. The answer to the question “how to do that” was far more challenging.
How We Proceeded. We wanted to take advantage of the latest technological advances and push the idea of realism to bring you a teaching tool that truly excites both you and your students. We did not want to add images or animations just for the sake of adding cool effects. It would be too easy to clutter the student workspace or even make the simulation more difficult to navigate. We wanted to add visual content that enhanced the learning, not detract from it.
We spent eighteen months brainstorming, prototyping, designing, sketching, animating, programming, focus grouping, re-designing, fixing, tweaking, and fine-tuning. The result is a new Marketplace that uses rich graphics where it can to make the student interface more intuitive.
A Visually Enhanced Story. Your students can now see the products or ads they design, or the factory they build and expand. The new Marketplace uses graphics to visualize important business principles that seem closer to real life when shown in our new, interactive, animations rather than plain text or diagrams. We use this new level of realism to add new ways to aid knowledge retention. In addition to presenting the simulation results in a conventional way in graphs and numbers, we also convey them via situational stories in a realistic 3D environment. As these stories resonate with the students on a more personal level, they allow the learning points to really sink in, much like they would during a real-life experience.
So in short, we redesigned Marketplace to feel more alive. After that, choosing a name for it was an easy task – Marketplace Live.
New Collaboration Tools. Among the many improvements in Marketplace Live, we added several new real-time team collaboration features. The new teamwork monitor allows team members to see which teammates are online and what decision areas they are working on. With the email and instant messenger now built directly into the student interface, teamwork among your students will be even more pleasant and efficient.
Multiple Players Can Work at the Same Time. Another feature you have been requesting has been added via our new intelligent locking system. It allows multiple team members to modify non-conflicting decision areas simultaneously.
Text Option is Still Available. Marketplace Live will obviously have higher demands on bandwidth and will be recommended for the classes/students that have high speed Internet access. However, this requirement should become less of an issue as overall Internet speed is constantly improving. Those with slower Internet will be able to turn the graphic-heavy features of the new version off, or simply stay with Marketplace 6 for a while. We plan to support both versions of Marketplace for many years to come.
Beta Classroom Adoptions begin in January. Marketplace Live has gone through several stages of rigorous testing in preparation of our beta release to the public in January. We rolled out the Introduction to Business and Strategy earlier this month with the Introduction to Marketing levels following in the latter part of the month. All other game levels will follow.
Take a Look. We invite you to preview Marketplace Live.
