In what appears to be one of the more baffling moves this generation, Microsoft’s General Manager of Xbox Live Marc Whitten told Next-Gen that certain Live Arcade titles that meet a certain low end criteria will be taken off the service.
“The way it will work is that the title will need to be at least 6 months old and have a Metacritic score below 65 and a conversion rate below 6% on the service. “
The questions begin. Why not keep them up and lower the price to a few dollars? This isn’t taking up shelf space, and people who haven’t bought the console lose out on a chance to own those games entirely. Having every game on the service on your hard drive is only a few gigs at best. It’s hard to believe there’s not room on a server for that data when any user can have them sitting at home.
Secondly, what happens in the case of a hard drive crash and you purchased one of those games? How can you re-download what’s already there? Isn’t this supposed to be one of the benefits of downloadable content?
Thirdly, if there are games performing that poorly, maybe quality control has some issues. Why make the smaller developers suffer from this stupid decision? For example, let’s say N+ didn’t do so well (just an example!). If it’s taken down, wouldn’t the developer prefer a chance at someone downloading it for $2 instead of removing it entirely because it didn’t catch on with a wide audience and the reviews were bland? Then there’s the preservation side of all of this that’s too complicated to get into here.
Seriously Microsoft, this is a dumb, dumb, move.
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Wed, Jul 23, 2008
Consoles, Xbox 360, download