That was quick: Microsoft has announced that they will start removing underperforming games from XBox Live Arcade.
You would think that infinite shelf space or the long tail meant something, but apparently not. I do not understand why the game industry has to be so different from, say, Amazon? Amazon does not believe that you have to push the same 20 products to all customers, but Microsoft believes so, and casual portals also seem to believe it.
It raises some questions about the status of XBox Live Community games: Couldn’t the developer just resubmit their game as a community game (if it was written in XNA)? There seems to contradictory forces at play – opening the 360 to developers, and closing the 360 to developers.
I also wonder why there aren’t any more titles beginning with A on XBLA? It is clearly an advantage to come high in the alphabet as that brings you to the top of the browsing list. I would make a game about an aardvark.
Very strange indeed. It would even come before Aarseth, which is somewhat of a feat in itself.
It seems to me like Microsoft is trying to avoid what happened to Atari (and to a greater extent the whole industry in 1983). It looks like they’re trying to push away the weak titles to make sure consumers do not become wary or dismissive of the whole XBLA thing because of a number of rotten apples. Which is a half-baked way of going about “quality assurance” without setting up teams to evaluate the products, thereby reducing costs. As you said, I’m not sure where’s the advantage now.
The opposing point of view – namely, that artificial scarcity a: increases profitability; b: helps users find the good games and skip the chaff – can be found articulated here:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18692
note that the Xbox Live announcement post-dates that opinion piece.
I don’t own an xbox and have never used live, but am curious about the reasoning behind this.
Is this a way to filter content? The article also suggests server issues, perhaps from hosting too much stuff?
My understanding from this post is that games appear in a giant list of some sort?
For filtering, normally similar services (amazon, youtube etc), use four main methods to filter content:
1. search
2. related lists
3. featured content
4. external links
Are these not available to live users? I suppose I can see them not having 1 for lack of keyboard, 2 for lack of content, and 4 for lack of web integration. If 3 is not available that would be surprising… but usually 3 is the least useful anyways.
youtube for example would be completely irrelevant if it didn’t have 1, 2 or 4. 1 and 4 are pretty much the only reason the web works at all.
I guess I’m just kind of shocked that they would just only use a giant list, if that really is all that they’re using.