In an interesting move in this era of transparency, Epic Games crafted a public Trello (an online organization service) board that showcases a roadmap of upcoming Epic Games Store features. For anyone who follows their massive Fortnite blog posts that often explain the reasoning behind the decisions they make in addition to raw numbers, this is par for the course.
But like any development schedule the stars aren’t going to always perfectly align, and objectives are going to slip or due dates might get missed, leading to outcry from users: which is exactly why Epic is re-tooling the Trello board to remove expected timelines. Big items on the “future development” header include wishlists, a shopping cart, automated refunds, gifting, achievements, and user reviews.
Smartly, Epic addressed this in a public blog post before they were found out and further criticized. The post states: “The Trello roadmap is not fulfilling the goal we set when it was introduced. The goal with the Trello roadmap is to provide visibility into the development cycle for the store’s more player-centric feature set. While it’s accomplished that to some degree, we’ve missed the mark accurately displaying the timelines for feature delivery. We regularly delay feature releases due to shifting priorities and the need for further iteration. We’re always focusing on improving, and we believe the Trello can be improved as well.”
Epic promises Trello updates every two weeks going forward. I’m just glad a roadmap of any kind exists, as not all storefronts have one.
Trello Revamp – Tracking Features [Epic Games Store]
Source: Destructoid Epic Games reworks their roadmap following complaints that they didn’t hit targets