There will be no Xbox 360 Spring Dashboard Update this year, as Microsoft focuses instead on updating its digital rights management (DRM) technology to enable game portability if gamers change their consoles.
Part of the focus on the revamped Xbox 360 DRM could be the experience of thousands of gamers who have had to send in their Xbox 360 for repair and/or replacement. In those instances, the new DRM could let gamers port their downloaded games, movies, TV shows and other information more easily to the replacement console.
Does this also mean online storage is in Microsoft’s future, perhaps for game saves and profile settings? We surmised that would end up being the case before the Xbox 360 even launched, but that’s still just surmising and guesswork.
What’s certain, however, is that there’s no Spring Dashboard Update. In addition, Microsoft will be removing some Xbox Live Arcade games from the queue. All XBLA games more than six months old that have a Metacritic score lower than 65 and have a “conversion rate” below six percent — sales information that consumers never really know — will be removed from Xbox Live to make way for new games.
Microsoft will also increase the maximum size of Xbox Live Arcade games to 350MB, nearly twice its current 150MB limit, and will institute a 1600 Microsoft Point option for developers to charge more for larger games.
