Microsoft on upcoming changes to Marketplace:

While the service has had a lot of success and now boasts over 130 titles, we think it is time to continue our focus on quality over quantity. … 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.

Basically, this is spin on how that the XBox Marketplace is done and over with. As any Long Tail believer knows, digital goods do not occupy shelf space. As your quantity grows, providing the right tools for your customers to find what they need becomes paramount. Games with a “Metacritic score below 65″ (interesting choice of metric, btw) may not be bad games - they might just be niche games, and there’s plenty of money to make in the niche. The ability for a customer to dig out, pay for, play, and enjoy some old or under-appreciated title 5 years from now was the whole point if you ask me, for both the customer and Microsoft.

Spend some time in the Marketplace though and you can see how this isn’t possible now. There’s no keyword search, and it takes forever to page through all the games. Instead of solving this, though, Microsoft has decided to make the critical mistake of ignoring it, and therefore probably screwing themselves out of a longer XBox 360 lifespan as well as tons of cash.

So, this means the Marketplace is done with. More nicely said, it has peaked. Microsoft has no intention on improving the way it works for their customers and their solution instead is to make it limited in use. This has to be the first 90s era “Microsofty” business decision I can think of that’s been done with the XBox 360. A sad thing, really, because there was so much potential there.