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It's too hard to find stuff on XBLA, says Microsoft
You know that sweet Ikea bookshelf you've been fawning over? It would go great in the family room, proudly displaying all of your favorite books and even that Precious Moments statue you pretend to like when your girlfriend stops by. It's functional, and makes things easy to find. But put a few thousand items on that same bookshelf and what you'd be left with is a colossal mess, something not unlike Microsoft's great, but equally cluttered Xbox Live Marketplace.Speaking to MTV Multiplayer, Aaron Greenberg, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Xbox Live product management director, owned up to the service's organization ills. "I think that we are not...happy with the ability to find and discover content," he said, adding that Microsoft "built Xbox Live Marketplace for a few hundred items and now we have 17,000 items." It's something the company is hoping to correct, at least in part with its controversial decision to shelve under-performing Xbox Live Arcade releases, but Greenberg admits that Microsoft is still looking for a solution to make content on Xbox Live easier to track down. We've contacted our Joystiq mentalists, who are at this very moment trying to project two simple words into the minds of XBL devs. Search. Bar.
XBLA delistings will put focus on quality, argues Microsoft
Microsoft's controversial decision to bump certain games off its Xbox Live Arcade service has generated plenty of discussion, with most pundits wondering why a shelf with infinite space is suddenly in need of clearing. Speaking to MTV Multiplayer, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Xbox Live product management director, Aaron Greenberg, argued that the move -- which is beginning to sound like a threat aimed at more dubious developers -- would ultimately promote a greater number of quality titles. "What you're going to see [is that] Arcade, in general, is going to focus on quality over quantity," he said. "While you will see [some] titles get delisted, hopefully you won't see many games getting delisted. [You'll see a] higher quality of games that won't fall into that criteria."Greenberg also sees the cleansing, which "outweighed the cons of expanding the shelf," as a move that will improve the service's appearance to new customers. "They're going to turn on the Xbox and go into Arcade and [see] a much higher quality of selection. You want consumers to get that experience for the first time [and see that] every Arcade game is a high-quality game, so their first purchase is most likely going to be a great game."We suspect having a clearly marked "rubbish" bin could similarly point new users to the good stuff, but it seems Microsoft would prefer not to have a waste basket standing right in the foyer.
