Game|Life’s Chris Kohler has written an interesting article in which he discusses Microsoft’s plan to cut low-performing games on XBLA, the proverbial Long Tail of their product line.
While this does potentially mean that Yaris might finally meet its grisly end, what with its dismal Metacritic rating of 17, Chris points out that it’s also a illogical solution to XBLA’s real problem – that the interface for finding games is God-awful. And Microsoft’s rubric for deciding which games stay and which games go most definitely does not benefit either the game developers (who could easily be surviving as part of the Long Tail), or game players, who are suffering from a poor interface rather than having too many choices.
Here’s a list of currently-available XBLA titles.