Sunday, May 25, 2008

Some XBLA Titles to Be Deleted

Microsoft has announced plans to start deleting some Xbox Live Arcade games from the marketplace. The games that would get the axe are ones that have a Metacritic score of less than 65, less than 6% conversion from demo to full ratio and have been on the marketplace for more than 6 months.

This seems like a dumb idea. Sure, there's some crap games out there on XBLA, but it's all digital. It doesn't cost Microsoft anything to keep it on the marketplace. Microsoft says that they want to start deleting games for two reasons: 1) "quality over quantity" and 2) there are too many games on XBLA, making it confusing.

Quality over quantity is a great idea. I love it. But they should focus on this before the games are released. Don't release games on XBLA that suck. It's as simple as that.

Too many games available on XBLA? That doesn't sound like a problem to me. That sounds like a good thing. The interface could use some work, though. Cycling through approximately 130 games can be irritating.

The reason I really feel like these deletions will be a bad thing is this: Microsoft has always touted the fact that you can delete your XBLA games to clear up room on your harddrive and then later redownload them at no cost. If these games are deleted from XBLA, users will no longer be able to redownload them.

3 comments:

Jester013 said...

Some Xbox employees have come out to say that delisted games will still be downloadable by those who have already purchased them. I'm not sure how this will work, but there you have it.

Unknown said...

I have to agree that making a smaller download list will only hurt them rather than help them. I've always said that their interface could use some work. How about more columns as well as an alphabet letter list at the top to quickly scroll through. Or using more of the controller buttons to do things, like the left and right bumpers could scroll through 10 items each time they are pressed.

Jester013 said...

Those are some good ideas for improving the interface. The scrolling through one at a time sucks.