[Edit: The article has changed to reflect the response by the Gamerscore blog]
Today NextGen.Biz, in a very casual interview with Marc Whitten - general manager of Xbox Live, some big and frankly frightening news was announced about the lifespan of titles on the Xbox Live Arcade.
In the interview, Mr. Whitten tells NextGen that "... in addition to allowing these bigger and better games we will be delisting older under performing titles in order to keep the service focused on a section of high quality games.".
For a game to actually be delisted, a game requires "... to be at least 6 months old and have a Metacritic score below 65 and a conversion rate below 6% on the service."
In my opinion, this is a bad, bad move. For one, it changed the entire process of the Xbox Live Arcade.
This isn't a matter of not enough space - the Xbox Live Arcade is minuscule compared to either the Video Marketplace, Demos, DLC or Game Videos. This is a based on sale numbers - most likely dreamt up by the Xbox marketing collective - wanting to remove any bruises to the XBLA's reputation. Some developers may claim that the XBLA lineup is "total shit" - but that's one persons opinion. There are thousands of other people who did download those games. Sometimes those games aren't meant for players like you and me - we would mostly ignore the presence of Bliss Island, Word Puzzle or Arkadian Warriors - but they're not made for me! That's the beauty of the Xbox Live Arcade.
But some of these games get panned by reviewers. I'm not a fan of them, but again they're not made with me in mind - they're made for kids who can have a far better time with it than me, or a 'casual gamer' who enjoys the newspaper crosswords, or someone with a Dungeon Crawl itch that needs scratching. Games like Cyberball 2072 or Speedball 2 really only appeal to Europeans, or for those who were 'there' at them time.
Microsoft even have an incredibly strict release structure - each title must be approved by them before it can even start creating the game. So any game that ends up being bad or poorly thought out, like the Tron games, were all approved of by Microsoft in the first place. While good games have been denied the chance to be on the service.
The way developers have been living off the XBLA is the 'long tail' effect. The way XBLA games sell is that they have a sales surge in their first week of release, then a pretty quick drop off. Previously released data in this GameSetWatch article revealed that "the first two months of Xbox Live Arcade titles only account for around a third of its sales, with revenues continuing to come in at a steady pace over the following year.", and in this Gamasutra article from Gamefest shows off the long tail of downloadable games:
It's the whole point of digital distribution - a service which never needs to go down, allowing people to continue buying games even after their previous sales period. From my understanding the Arcade games for the original Xbox, which used an entirely different system set - are still available for download, as well as downloadable content for Project Gotham Racing 2 despite the two Xbox 360 sequels and they're not even free!
In fact, most of those games under the 65% line are classic games - games like Asteroids or Scramble - I didn't buy them because they're not for me!
In fact, according to Metacritic - 63 seperate games are below the 65% line already - that's over half of the current XBLA lineup.
In this world of patches a opinions can also change - take Mr. Driller Online for instance. It's single player campaign is fine with some poor graphics on top - but the Multiplayer is completely broken. So IGN end up giving the game a 2.5, a very poor review due to the broken online. Namco have said they will be patching the game though, the game would have likely changed after this was fixed. Still, the 2.5 remains. The recent Penny Arcade game has been getting some fine reviews, but EDGE Magazine also gave it a 4 out of 10, lowering the overall mark by a large margin, and due to the high price might not sell as well as other, cheaper games. If the game gets consistent 7 and 8's like it is, that one score could throw them under that line.
Xbox Live Arcade games are not reviewed like every other game either! Arcade titles don't tend to get reviews at all, not nearly as many as regular titles. Take Word Puzzle for instance - it has a Metacritic rating of 44%, but that's out of 15 reviews total, hardly a large enough sum to warrant removal from the service. Gripshift - a game I found absolutely fantastic has a Metacritic score of 77% out of only 25 reviews. A true game like Project Gotham Racing 4 gets over 60 reviews.
The Metacritic audience is NOT the Xbox Live Arcade audience! I actually disagree with the way Arcade or downloadable titles are reviewed. For instance, Lost Winds just came out on WiiWare, and has gotten a lot of positive reviews - except a lot of them push on the fact that this title will only last 2 to 4 hours. I don't expect games to last longer than 3 or 4 hours when they're only $10US - I'm paying full price sometimes for titles which are much not much longer.
So what happens once the games I own get delisted? You are in fact able to download the games again, as written in this follow up, but using your download history is a huge pain and doesn't allow new users to buy! If you have a friend who just bought a Xbox 360 and you're recommending titles - they may not be able to buy it! This goes against the entire point of online distribution, where there IS no shelf space that needs emptying - it's all there and anyone at any point can buy it!
It's all very confusing and very unnecessary. Admittedly another company has done this before - Nintendo. Last year in Europe Nintendo released Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels for Wii Virtual Console - but only for a week. It was a limited time "get it while you can" release, but there was never any real reason for it - it's digital! It's disgusting.
Microsoft said that they would announce 3 months ahead of time whether or not a game will be removed - what's the point of this? You're going to remove it anyhow, the developer can't start advertising it on marketplace since you're removing it! All this ends up doing is scaring developers from doing something different and interesting, something that may not sell particularly well - the PS3 thrives on these bizarre games like flOw and the PixelJunk series which may not end up selling all that well - but they're not going to stop you trying. This will.
I believe this is a very dumb decision - and I hope that this uproar - much like the Mass Effect DRM uproar and the Battlefield Bad Company "buy extra guns" uproar - will cause Microsoft to rethink their strategy.
Right now the main problem with getting more people on the Xbox Live Arcade is the - frankly confusing Xbox 360 Operating System which now hides away the Xbox Live Arcade and lumps it with everything else. The only source of official XBLA news is through Major Nelson and a press release - there is no actual community newsletter or way to preview something on Xbox without having to go through hoops. America might be different since they have the Inside Xbox program, but Microsoft haven't been actively supporting a whole lot of Xbox Live Arcade. That's why I made this site in the first place!
So start yelling and carrying on, start digging, make your voice heard on what you think of this plan. You may have to grab your copy of Roboblitz right now.
On a lighter note: Microsoft have made a new development team to work on internal XBLA titles, and the filesize has been expanded from 150 to 350 megabytes.
There have been plenty of other great articles on this topic, here are some link to what I thought were the best - they're all must reads:
Gamasutra - Opinion: Why Artificial Scarcity Could Boost Digital Game Downloads
Angry-Gamer.net - Microsoft to XBLA Developers: "I Expect You To Die"
Mersey Remakes - More Clueless XBLA Decisions
Game|Life - Microsoft: Don't Cut Off the Long Tail
And of course, the original interview:
Source: Next-Gen.Biz: EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: MS to Delist XBLA Titles
Castle Crashers is finished! Well, sort of - Bohemoth have sent off the game to be tested rigorously by the Microsoft QA team to make sure everything is working, all the text is correct in all the languages, make sure the game doesn't suddenly crash all of a sudden. It takes a while, and considering the amount of stuff this game appears to have, it may take a little while longer than, say, a SEGA Classics game. 
Click here for the new images of the game!
