No XBOX 360 Spring Update this year?

In an interview with general manager of Xbox Live Marc Whitten, Next-Gen gets all the first details on big changes to the service—including that there will be no spring dashboard update, and that underperforming XBLA titles will be removed.
According to Whitten, XBLA titles that have been out for more than six months, have a Metacritic score of less than 65%, and have a conversion rate of less than 6% will be eligible for desliting. Microsoft will give three months of notice before these titles are removed. Whitten also told us that there would be no spring dashboard update for Xbox 360 owners this year, saying that resources were instead focused on “building the proper infrastructure and scale for the service.” There will however be a change to DRM policy and a tool released next month that will allow 360 owners to re-license content to a single console—finally fixing the issue that forced gamers playing XBLA games to be connected to Xbox LIVE if their 360 broke down and was replaced.

Read on for the complete Q and A, which provides all the details on this news and more, including a new 1st party development studio and why the DRM issue took so long to resolve…