Gotta say I was quite surprised by the recent Microsoft announcement to delist underperforming Live Arcade titles. First thing that came to mind was that they needed to create better user-rating and filtering tools (in line with long-tail thinking). Or, is the cost to storing those games on the server greater than just a few conversions?

I was going to whip up a more thorough brain dump, but looks like Tadhg Kelly beat me to the punch via his opinion piece at Gamasutra). I very much like Tadhg’s dissection of the issues - though he’s a tad more colorful than needed (and attracted the ire of several commenters). Like Tadhg, I’m not buying their “forces quality” argument.

Something Tadhg doesn’t really touch on is how MS usually boasts about their unusually high conversion rates (for many of the titles) as part of their pitch to win/attract content to XBLA. Perhaps culling the duds allows them to artificially keep boasting…