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Xbox Live Arcade shake-up: quality rather than quantity, says MS

by Steven Williamson on 23 May 2008, 11:20

Tags: Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)

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General manager of Xbox Live, Marc Whitten has revealed that there's going to be a major shake-up of it's Xbox live service, that will start with the de-listing of poorly rated arcade games.

Speaking with Next-gen.biz, Whitten says that there are over 130 titles currently available, but that it's now time to "focus on quality over quantity." This will start with the culling of a number of titles that are over 6 months old, that achieved a score of less than 60% on video game review website, Metacritic and had a conversion rate of less than 6%.

In a bid to attract bigger and better games, Whitten has confirmed that game size limits for developers have now been raised from 150mb to 350mb and as a result the pricing structure will reflect the change, with publishersallowed to charge up to 1600 Microsoft points (approx £13.60) per game; the current maximum charge is 1200 points.

Finally, Whitten has announced that they'll be "launching a new fully funded 1st party studio which will be focused on high quality digital content creation." Not such good news for third-party developers.

It may be good news for gamers though as many of the poorer titles should no longer make the grade, but of course it also means we'll have to pay more for the privilege of playing better games.

What happens if you've bought a de-listed gamesand want to download it again at a later point?

Source :: Next-gen biz


HEXUS Forums :: 9 Comments

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What happens if they get rid of games you've already bought?

And (assuming that MS will just remove them from download on the XBLA menu) Will we still be able to play them? online?

And if we already have the demo, will we still be able to purchase the full game (as I'm assuming when you download the demo you get the full game with just a code block stopping you accessing anything beyond the demo)?
Blademrk
What happens if they get rid of games you've already bought?

And (assuming that MS will just remove them from download on the XBLA menu) Will we still be able to play them? online?

And if we already have the demo, will we still be able to purchase the full game (as I'm assuming when you download the demo you get the full game with just a code block stopping you accessing anything beyond the demo)?

There's certainly more questions than answers. There's also reports that the Spring Update has been canned, although I can't actually find any ‘real’ evidence for this.
next gen conducted an interview with someone from MS:
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: MS to Delist XBLA Titles : Next Generation - Interactive Entertainment Today, Video Game and Industry News - Home of Edge Online

Whitten also told us that there would be no spring dashboard update for Xbox 360 owners this year, saying that resources were instead focused on “building the proper infrastructure and scale for the service.” There will however be a change to DRM policy and a tool released next month that will allow 360 owners to re-license content to a single console—finally fixing the issue that forced gamers playing XBLA games to be connected to Xbox LIVE if their 360 broke down and was replaced.

which is something of a misquote from their own article as what was actually said further in the piece was

We have taken a different approach this spring and spent a lot of our time and resources of building the proper infrastructure and scale for the service not just today but also into the future. So while most users will not notice any significant changes to the dashboard this spring, I can tell you that the team will be releasing a new digital rights management (DRM) tool next month that will allow you to better consolidate your licenses for downloaded content to a single Xbox and allow you the freedom to be able to play your content both online and offline

It doesn't say that there won't be a spring update, just that there won't be many new features this time around.
That sucks
Blademrk
next gen conducted an interview with someone from MS:
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: MS to Delist XBLA Titles : Next Generation - Interactive Entertainment Today, Video Game and Industry News - Home of Edge Online



which is something of a misquote from their own article as what was actually said further in the piece was



It doesn't say that there won't be a spring update, just that there won't be many new features this time around.

I can't believe how many of the gaming sites have simply copied what Next gen have said without obviously reading the interview. He doesn't say there isn't an update, yet it's all over the net referring to this specific article.