Xbox Live Arcade may be in for some rather sweeping changes in the coming month it seems. According to Xbox Live's General Manager Marc Whitten, Microsoft will be cleaning out a lot of the chaff and trying to sow seeds of greatness in the future.
Speaking to Next-Gen, Whitten confirms that Microsoft will be launching a new first party studio to focus on developing new games designed just for XBLA and that a lot of the weaker games will be purged according to strict criteria.
According to Whitten, those criteria mean that any XBLA game with a Metacritic average score below 65 percent and with a demo-to-full conversion rate of beneath 6 percent will be wiped from the service. Players will be given a three month warning that a game is going to be pulled.
As Kotaku points out, that includes several games you probably never heard nor cared about, including Cyberball 2072 and Arkadian Warriors.
"Overall I think you will find this will focus the catalogue more on larger, more immersive games and make it much easier to find the games you are looking for," said Whitten.
The XBLA exec also revealed that there'll be no Spring dashboard update for the Xbox this year, but that a new DRM system is planned that Whitten describes as allowing "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."
Great, just what we need. Are you a big fan of an XBLA game which you think might face the chop? Let us know in the forums.
Speaking to Next-Gen, Whitten confirms that Microsoft will be launching a new first party studio to focus on developing new games designed just for XBLA and that a lot of the weaker games will be purged according to strict criteria.
According to Whitten, those criteria mean that any XBLA game with a Metacritic average score below 65 percent and with a demo-to-full conversion rate of beneath 6 percent will be wiped from the service. Players will be given a three month warning that a game is going to be pulled.
As Kotaku points out, that includes several games you probably never heard nor cared about, including Cyberball 2072 and Arkadian Warriors.
"Overall I think you will find this will focus the catalogue more on larger, more immersive games and make it much easier to find the games you are looking for," said Whitten.
The XBLA exec also revealed that there'll be no Spring dashboard update for the Xbox this year, but that a new DRM system is planned that Whitten describes as allowing "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."
Great, just what we need. Are you a big fan of an XBLA game which you think might face the chop? Let us know in the forums.
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