When Microsoft said it was going to start taking some games off of its Xbox Live Arcade service, I was puzzled. When all your goods are digital, your shelf space is effectively unlimited. If even one person downloads an unpopular game, that’s one more sale than you would have had, and almost all pure profit to boot.

Well, it seems Microsoft recognizes the same thing. Talking to IGN last week, vice president John Schappert said that the company has no immediate plans to take down any games. Instead, they’re working on the interface to make browsing all the titles less cumbersome.

Console makers are always concerned about the quality of their game library, and have been ever since the great video game crash of 1983, when a deluge of crappy games for the Atari and its competitors nearly took out the entire industry. (Remember the “Nintendo Seal of Quality” on old NES game boxes? The crash was why Nintendo put certifications on its games in the first place.)

I’m very happy to see Microsoft recognizing this as an interface issue rather than an inventory issue. The video game market is notoriously mercurial, with all-or-nothing big-budget titles trying to recover their costs before their month on the shelf runs out and sales slow to a trickle. A vital marketplace for digital-only games (besides cell phones) encourages the creation of more small, quality games that let more independent creators compete with the big companies.

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