Xbox Live Arcade has no shortage of shovelware.  Sure, you have your quality titles, like Carcassone and Pacman: Championship Edition, but countless dual-analog shooters, 2D platformers, ported Flash games and that God-awful Yaris game have been choking the library for months.  With so much unplayable garbage on the list, many gamers don’t even bother with the Arcade anymore.  

Microsoft plans to do something about it.  In an interview with Next-Gen,  Xbox Live GM Marc Whitten stated that “we will be delisting older underperforming titles in order to keep the service focused on a section of high quality games,” adding, "Overall I think you will find this will focus the catalog more on larger, more immersive games and make it much easier to find the games you are looking for."  So how will Microsoft choose which games get the axe?  According to Whitten, “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.  This way titles are not just considered if they are not selling well or not getting good reviews, but actually a combination of both.  We will also give a three-month notice before delisting any title."

It’s about time they did this.  The glut of bad titles has left me and many other gamers tired of the service, and it’ll be nice to see a streamlined list for the service again.  Now that the file size cap has been increased from 150 MB to 350 MB, we could soon be looking at a streamlined list of even better (or at least bigger) games.  


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