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Microsoft's Destination Arcade Only Available During Summer Of Arcade (UPDATE)
UPDATE: Major Nelson has provided further clarification on this confusing issue to ShackNews. Destination Arcade will only be available to download during the Summer of Arcade event, but it will continue functioning past then. If you happen to pick up an Xbox 360 after the Summer of Arcade 2010 or you just aren't able to turn on your system and download Destination Arcade during that time, you'll apparently have to do without the new Arcade-browsing UI. Still no explanation as to why Microsoft would suddenly decide to limit Destination Arcade's availability.
ORIGINAL STORY: Earlier today, we reported that the launch of Microsoft's Destination Arcade, a new browser app for Xbox Live Arcade games, had been pushed back to coincide with their yearly Summer of Arcade event. Now in a weird turn of events, Microsoft has announced that Destination Arcade will only be available during the Summer of Arcade.
The news comes via an update to Major Nelson's blog post on Destination Arcade. Xbox Live director of programming Larry Hryb said simply in the blog post, "I have learned that the Destination Arcade app will only be available for the duration of the Summer of Arcade promotion which ends August 18th."
It's unclear what the reasoning is behind building a whole new UI for accessing Live Arcade games and then only letting people use it for a month. Perhaps this wasn't shaping up to be the upgrade to Arcade game browsing that Microsoft had hoped? We'll get our hands on Destination Arcade next week and can finally find out for ourselves.
[via @cselogy]
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