14 DAY TRIAL // It is always good to see that a big company plans to make some good changes that will give us, gamers, an overall better experience. The company we're talking about now is, strangely, Microsoft. The giants have decided to increase the XBLA file limit to 350MB (as we reported a couple of days ago here) and they have also announced plans to remove underperforming XBLA titles on a systematic manner.
However, do not expect a huge loss of XBLA titles, nor visible changes too soon. Microsoft is still making money from all the titles, even if some of them have poor sales, which means that only XBLA titles with a score below 65 on website Metacritic, with a 6 percent or lower trial conversion rate will be delisted - not immediately, but after a three month grace period (Microsoft have officially confirmed this info to website Gamasutra).
Although a 65 average score on Metacritic looks fair enough, according to some research made by gaming forum NeoGAF, it seems that no less than 45 Xbox Live Arcade titles have a score lower than 65 (including free releases, such as Aegis Wing and others). Still, since Microsoft has never made public the conversion rates per-title, it would be pretty hard to estimate now which titles will be dropped (and there is always the possibility for the scores to increase, very unlikely, though). It is also unclear whether the game that gets delisted would still be available as re-downloads for those who purchased them in the past.
Also, Microsoft have admitted to be working on opening an own, internal development team that is going to focus on downloadable content - this means that they will no longer release a spring dashboard update for the Xbox 360, but will focus on improving backbone server issues.