Microsoft's Scott Austin talks XBLA delistings and delays
by Mike Schramm 
{ Jul 16th 2008 at 6:00PM }
Austin was dodgy, unfortunately. When asked when games might start disappearing from the service, he stayed mum, only saying that Microsoft wanted to "keep evolving and improving [its] content." We also asked for comment on the unofficial list of games that met the criteria for delisting, and he agreed that the list is accurate according to the criteria.
We also talked to Austin about the delays that Microsoft has made in releasing content, and he told us that Microsoft runs a very stringent QA process in addition to any processes the developers run for themselves. The largest part of these delays, he said, is "making sure the games we release are high quality" -- Microsoft runs every game through for bugs, and will then send back to the developers any game that has issues. When pressed for a percentage of games that are sent back for bugs, Austin told he us didn't have that information.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Obie @ Jul 16th 2008 6:05PM
"making sure the games we release are high quality"
Shrek and Roll....nuff said.
Korova *of the highlands* @ Jul 16th 2008 6:07PM
Are we gonna start having Snuff Thursdays, listing the titles taken off XBLA this week?
Maybe we can have Ghost of the Week picks for the best of the delisted games.
Its kinda absurd that they are doing it, although they are saying that its to maintain a high average quality or some such nonsense.
What about niche games and cult favorites?
Snowblind @ Jul 16th 2008 6:40PM
Like..? No, I can't think of anything like that on XBLA. Unlike with Sony and Nintendo's services, we have trials. People can try out the games, the ones that are good, tend to be bought, and the games that are bad are downloaded, tried out, and deleted quickly.
At this point there's a very large library of games on there, and a lot of them are very poor quality. If they're simply getting rid of the poor games, that nobody actually buys, then I have no problem. I don't think any game that's actually good will be getting removed, but if they get rid of things like Yaris? I don't think anyone will be complaining, and as far as we know, they're only deleting the games with very low purchase rates.
Korova *of the highlands* @ Jul 16th 2008 8:41PM
Ironically, Yaris will not be removed because it is free, so there is no purchase rate for it. 8)
Joe Smith @ Jul 16th 2008 6:22PM
Give the guy a break. Sounds like Joystiq went in in full on hostile mode. Can't blame him for ignoring them.
Let's see, according to this site, thre are too many bad games on XBLA, and it woudl be bad to remove any games, and too many games are shipping, and they are taking too long to ship...
Xoviet chiK @ Jul 16th 2008 6:37PM
They should cancel these delisting plans, unless they don't have faith in their new Dashboard. Hopefully they put this on the back burner for a while, and see how and if the problem of knowing about and accessing XBLA games will be addressed by the UI Overhaul this autumn.
h0mi @ Jul 16th 2008 10:11PM
Delisting is a stupid idea IMO. I would rather they do something about glitched achievements that don't work at all, or do something about developers like EA who have achievements that become impossible because EA deactivates their XBL support for older games.