If you’ve been following the latest news out of Microsoft you may have noticed the article with Marc Whitten where he mentions that certain under performing Xbox LIVE Arcade titles are going to be delisted from the Xbox LIVE Marketplace. Chris Paladino was quick to clarify some of the community questions about it in his post over here. reassuring people that they will still be able to download the title from their Account Management->Download History section of their Xbox 360 Dashboard.
I can understand the need to do this. There are 130 Xbox LIVE Arcade titles currently available on Xbox LIVE UK and it can really make it difficult to see which titles are good and which aren’t. But why remove the under performing titles? There is already an Xbox LIVE Marketplace section titled Arcade Hits but it only has 7 titles in it. Why not just create more means by which the content can be categorised?
One great idea is to allow users to see more meta data about the title. Its mentioned that titles with less than 65 on Metacritic and a bunch of other sales criteria are likely to be de-listed. Why not expose that information about the title in the Xbox LIVE Marketplace? I can just see it now, it’d be a wicked mash-up of Xbox LIVE Marketplace content and external ratings. Heck, why not allow respected gaming sites to offer rating services and allow the gamers to choose which ratings providers they’d like to see? And yes, the ratings providers should not be allowed to add free text to the listing, just a range of scores about the graphics, sound, gameplay and overall as most of them currently do anyway.
And while we’re at it, allow me to rate the games I play for all to see and let only my friends and mature users see my comments about the title.
Its awesome to see the growth in Xbox LIVE Marketplace content but I honestly believe its time for simpler and more powerful ways of navigating and finding the content I want out of all the other content. Don’t take the old content away, I might still want to try that out!
[tags]Xbox LIVE Marketplace,XBLA,Xbox LIVE Arcade,rant[/tags]
Hmm well that really sucks..
I couldn’t agree more there aren’t THAT many Xbox Live Arcade gmes that they should be removing any (and I don’t think there ever will be).
I was going through the games yesterday and it was almost impossible to find anything… even when I found something I liked, the descriptions were very vague. So you end up wasting time and effort downloading the demo if the graphic and short description really grab you… and if they don’t well you might lose out on a game you would have really enjoyed….
I think it’s sad. The point of DDL’s is that the obscure titles can stay “on the shelf”. It’s seldom that a game is completely uninteresting it’s more a case of ‘not worth $5’. They should rather open up a “bargain bin” section and dump them in there for 100-200 points. I’d rather spend my leftover points on that then some stupid gamerpics.