Remember When Xbox Threatened To Delist Games With Poor Metacritic Scores?

Remember the days of Xbox Live Arcade on Xbox 360? The service served as a way for games to be published digitally, from major companies such as EA to one-person indie developers - and everything in-between.

But back in 2008, Microsoft made the decision that it wanted to rid the service of lesser-quality titles, taking the drastic measure to threaten that if a game hadn't received a 65 or higher on Metacritic, it could be removed.

"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 percent on the service. We will also give a three-month notice before delisting any title."

This actually put quite a few games in the category for potential delisting at the time, but in October of 2008, IGN was told that the company had "no immediate plans to act on de-listing," simply setting "parameters by which we can delist".

Ultimately, it appears no games were actually delisted because of this, although some Xbox Live Arcade titles did eventually leave the service for other reasons, such as the recently re-released Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: The Game.

Do you remember this? Give us your thoughts on this down in the comments below.