Next-Gen: How would you say the Xbox Live Marketplace has performed in your estimation? We understand you have some milestones you'd like to share.

Marc Whitten: Xbox LIVE Marketplace continues to perform above and beyond our wildest expectations. As we announced at GDC we have seen more than $250 million spent in marketplace since we launched and are currently supporting around 30 million downloads on the service every month.  Pretty amazing to think that on an average day 1 million downloads are taking place on Xbox LIVE.  I remember it took us four months after launch to hit the 10 million milestone.  Now today we have sold more than 15 million songs across just a couple of titles on the service.  Even our video store is currently driving more than one-third of the paid downloads on marketplace.  Overall digital distribution of games and entertainment content continues to evolve at an amazingly fast pace.  

And yet, despite the achievements the Marketplace has made, you're still making significant changes to the service. Why have you decided to make those changes?

Absolutely, what has happened almost overnight is that the service we built for a few hundred items mainly for a gaming audience now has over 15,000 pieces of content.  The team is continuing to look at new ways to enhance the service and make it easier to find the content you want.  At the same time there is a lot of incremental infrastructure work going on to be able to scale and support the 12 million members we have across 26 countries.  At the same time we are evolving to meet customer’s entertainment needs.

Could you describe the changes we can expect to see in the Marketplace in the near future?

Well probably the biggest change I can share with you today is a series of new policies along with a new internal approach and investment in the Xbox LIVE Arcade business going forward.  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.  This means that we need to allow developers more time and more space to make even bigger and better games.  So we are officially increasing our XBLA game size limits dramatically from 150mb to 350mb.  We are also giving publishers more flexibility in how they price their games and opening up a new 1600 Microsoft Points price point for some of these now bigger and better games. This week we already have seen a title that is taking advantage of this and getting great response, Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One.  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.  Finally, we are also going to be putting our money where our mouth is here and are launching a new fully funded 1st party studio which will be focused on high quality digital content creation.  
 
What would qualify a title for delisting? Would Microsoft choose titles for delisting, or would the publisher or content creators be involved in the decision as well? Are there any titles currently on the Marketplace we can expect to be delisted in the near future?

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.