List of Potential XBLA Delisting Candidates
By Chris on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 7:35 PM PST In Game Companies, Game Consoles, Game Platforms, Gamer Life, Games, Microsoft, Microsoft
Aside from the obvious question — why — surrounding Microsoft’s announcement that it will delist Xbox Live Arcade games that fail to meet certain criteria, the net big question is what games might be removed? MyGen went through the trouble of compiling a list of games that have been on Arcade for more than six months and have a Metascore of less than 65, which you can see below in alphabetical order, thanks to 1UP.
- Arkadian Warriors
- Asteroids & Asteroids Deluxe
- Battlestar Galactica
- Centipede & Millipede
- Contra
- Crystal Quest
- Cyberball 2072
- Defender
- Double Dragon
- Ecco the Dolphin
- Fatal Fury Special
- Frogger
- Geon: Emotions
- Gyruss
- Hardwood Backgammon
- Hardwood Hearts
- Hardwood Spades
- Mad Tracks
- Marathon: Durandal
- Missile Command
- New Rally-X
- Novadrome
- Pac-Man
- Root Beer Tapper
- Rush’n Attack
- Scramble
- Screwjumper
- Shrek-N-Roll
- Soltrio Solitaire
- Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe
- Spyglass Board Games
- Street Trace: NYC
- Super Contra
- Tempest
- Tetris Splash
- Texas Hold ‘em
- Time Pilot
- TiQal
- Track & Field
- Wing Commander Arena
- Word Puzzle
- Xevious
- Yie Ar Kung-Fu
How many games from the list do you own? I’ve got more than a half dozen from that list, and there are a number of others (including Double Dragon) that I’ve come very close to purchasing.
I still don’t understand Microsoft’s decision to do this. We’ll continue following the story and see where it takes us.
On the one hand I agree with the question of why. On Major Nelson’s recent podcast he had Aaron Greenburg on and they talked about ‘clearing the store shelves for new inventory.’ That makes perfect sense for products that take up physical space, but for stuff that has to sit on the servers anyway (so owners can redownload it and people can buy it if someone uses the Send to a Friend (or whatever it’s called)), why not continue to make it available? Cut the price to half and see if they can milk some more money out of those titles. Move them to a ‘bargain bin’ area on the site if the real goal is to make the newer titles easier to search through.
Contra? Frogger?! PAC-MAN?! Those 3 certainly don’t make sense to delist.
I count at least four, at minimum, that I own.
Here’s the big question: What if you purchased these games, then you have to RMA your XBox and it gets replaced? How will you re-download your titles?
Way to go, MS.
They should just make Retro, Archive, and Bargain folders. There needs to be more options for sorting: # of downloads, release date, people who buy the games should be able to rank them with 1-5 stars and allow us to sort it that way.
Now I won’t be deleting the demos.