Xbox Live De-listing Demystified

via IGN


Xbox Live's director of product management Aaron Greenberg fleshed out the near future of the service this weekend on Major Nelson's podcast, reiterating a few upcoming changes and expanding on Microsoft's plan to "de-list" some games on Live.

During his guest spot on the podcast, hosted by Xbox Live programming director Larry "Major Nelson" Hyrb, Greenberg expanded on Xbox Live general manager Marc Whitten's statements last week that the company will soon clean house, removing some underperforming Xbox Live Arcade titles.

Games that have been on XBLA at least 6 months, have an average rating of less than 65 percent and have a conversion rate of less than 6 percent will be removed from the listings. Microsoft counts a conversion every time someone downloads the trial version of a game and then follows it up with a purchase of the full version.

In general, Greenberg said, new games and top-selling titles will never be on the chopping block. Rather, Microsoft is attempting to make newer, more popular games easier to find by removing some of the clutter.

Although an unfortunate few will be removed from the list of downloadable XBLA games, the de-listed titles will never be permanently removed from the service, Greenberg said. They just won't be available to new customers and won't show up when browsing the list of games.

"You will always be able to play the games you own," Greenberg said. "If you buy a game, we're never going to take it away."

De-listed games will also be available for re-download, he said, to gamers who have purchased them in the past. Leaderboards and other Live support will also continue for de-listed games.

While on the podcast, Greenberg also shared some updated Xbox Live numbers:

Total Xbox Live games: About 130
Average daily downloads: About 1 million
New XBLA game file size cap: 350 MB
Percent of first-week U.S. GTA IV purchases for Xbox 360: 65
Number of items on Xbox Live: About 17,000
Number of items on PlayStation Store: About 600