What happened to the marketplace ????

#1 I haven't been on GarageGames for quite a while... not extensively since briefly after the new site was instated. I suppose more was lost in the transition than I had realized!

The marketplace is definitely missed, though. It was more than nice to be able to obtain affordable assets from individuals in a user-friendly manner without digging through forum posts.

I wonder if anyone would be interested in a third-party alternative that caters nearly exclusively to the Torque community?

#2 I also liked and miss the marketplace. The forums work, but the marketplace worked better.

#3 Hey guys, can you write out what specifically would be helpful to you in this case? Maybe we can find a solution here.

#4 I think what the guys are referring to is a place to buy content from an individual forum user rather than have to buy advertised content on the site.
for example... if they cant make a single object they need the most say for instance a weapon they have created with their imagination they will have severe setbacks in the game if they are not a 3d artist they cannot make it or if they are not a coder they cannot code it.
A market place to hire someone as a team mate or for a one off piece of work would help dramatically.

I think it would be wise to link the gaming community as one rather than seperate parts there are a lot of people with a lot of game development knowledge that have never come across garagegames unfortunately and i think if they were to advertise theyre skills here they would be afraid it would be seen as spam,

I have come across a blender Community with my endless scouring of the net for Blender help those guys would be a massive asset to any team as blender is a free open source program.

that was just an example im sure there are many other forums out there like game designers, artists, coders, administrators etc that are all probably in limbo waiting for a purpose.

long story short... a for hire forum and a work needed forum
also a direct link to other forums would help if both forum owners agreed to set a similar link,

i can keep going but i`ll leave it there incase im not on the right track or i have offended anyone.
Thanks for reading.

#5 I would pay for: specific, correct answers to various questions left unresolved by my forum posts. Either from GG, if they can figure out how to provide such a service at a reasonable rate, or from anyone else willing to provide said service.

#6 A way for service providers to get listed as available (coders, artists, larger teams, etc), and for projects looking for help to be listed too.

As a freelance coder, I would love to be emailed about new projects that need a coder and are willing to pay for it, when I am looking for new gigs.

I also don't want to go thru too many hoops honestly to use the marketplace either. Like fill in a profile of my skills etc that takes hours to complete.

#7 I have added "For Hire", "Looking for Work", and "Bounties" category tags to the general Jobs discussion area. With this, you can select the applicable tags to apply to a new thread you post. These are searchable as well. I will look into other possibilities for other helpful things as well.

#8 Personally, I lean towards either a section of the site or an affiliated external site dedicated to the listing of assets and jobs... I don't really think forums are the best answer in this scenario. For the purpose of the discussion, in a forum you can't visit either a "Jobs" or "For Hire" section and instantly sort the available posts by the type of work in question (engine coding, scripting, static/dynamic artwork, web coding, etc), nor which are offering compensation, nor... there are many possibilities.

Likewise, on the asset side of things, you cannot view the available assets by category, tag, relevant genre, price, popularity, rating, etc...

What I'm getting at is that a forum isn't terribly suited to solving the marketplace issue without very heavy modifications. In the current scenario, looking for a job or asset with specific attributions is entirely limited to what you can find by digging and using the search function. While your category tags will undoubtedly aid the situation (thanks for the quick implementation!), I feel like a site is still the optimal solution.

Currently there is no structured post template, so it naturally takes much longer to obtain the same amount of information that would be displayed in a handful of clicks on a marketplace website...

#9 I totally agree: I said the same thing when I came on here after it was changed and was like, what? The old structure used to be way clearer and more organized. You could find exactly what you were looking for with a glance and a couple clicks. Now it's all mish-mashed together. I thought I had said something to that effect before, but nobody seemed to notice.

The rest of the website is an improvement, I think, but things like the marketplace feel like they've been relegated to second place. I'm not sure GarageGames realizes how big the marketplace was getting (and how much bigger it would be if it were easier to find). I've had the best luck with getting hired for freelance work here, more than any of the scores of other websites I've tried.

#10 Agreed on that as well. Do not change something that works well.

#11 I heard more complaints about the marketplace than praise. So this topic surprises me somewhat.

#12 Well, David, you should probably know then, that there were a LOT of people, including myself, who used it, benefited from it, and loved it. I never was vocal about liking it because I never knew that the marketplace was an endangered species.


PLEASE, please please bring it back. I've hired about a half dozen developers for help for one thing or another over the past few years and the marketplace was a good, solid tool for me to find people and let them bid on my projects. Its currently hard for people to find my jobs and bid on them because they get "lost in the sauce" of the forum format, which is not as well suited for this.

PLEASE bring it back.

#13 If you want start a feasible project with fund and re-trained.Waiting fore your reply.