So the big story today is the Next-Gen interview with XBLA manager Marc Whitten, where he states:

In addition to allowing these bigger and better games we will be delisting older underperforming titles in order to keep the service focused on a section of high quality games.

The way it will work is that the title will need to be at least 6 months old and have a Metacritic score below 65 and a conversion rate below 6% on the service.  This way titles are not just considered if they are not selling well or not getting good reviews, but actually a combination of both.  We will also give a three-month notice before delisting any title.  Overall I think you will find this will focus the catalogue more on larger, more immersive games and make it much easier to find the games you are looking for.

Out of curiosity, I decided to compile a list of these poor performers, to see what kind of sweep we could be looking at. Please keep in mind that this list is based only on metacritic scores. Conversion rate (the percentage of players who buy the full game after downloading the demo) will most definitely be one of the strongest factors in determining whether a game will be delisted from Xbox Live Arcade, and hard conversion numbers are very difficult to get ahold of. According to Microsoft, the average conversion rate one year ago was 18%, with a high of 51% and a low of 4%. While we don’t know how much the numbers have changed, I’m guessing that it’s only going to be the very bottom of the barrel that ends up affected. Don’t expect a mass cleansing of all the crap games from XBLA anytime soon.

With that said, here’s the list.

My first take after reading over the list? Enough with the half-assed arcade ports already. With that said, some of the low rated arcade titles are much better games than the scores would infer. How do you review Pac-Man, anyway? What’s the metric? Does it have to stand on its own against a Gears of War or Bioshock, or are you only weighing the implementation of and additions to the original game?