Microsoft is undergoing a rather ambitious experiment with XNA, the set of developer tools that allows anyone to create and submit a game to be sold on Xbox Live, but a former employee is now raising questions about the quality of the games. David Weller, the former XNA community manager, has posted on his blog that he believes a lot of good games are going to be crowded out in a market that will be saturated with junk releases. Considering the recent delisting of Xbox Live Arcade games this seems like a direct about face.

"... the danger for consumers lies in Microsoft’s deliberate steps to avoid discussions regarding game quality, even during peer review. I firmly believe that avoiding commentary/ratings on game quality will result in frustrated consumers, who will have no way to discern the quality of a game among (ultimately) thousands."

With this peek behind the curtain Weller has revealed that Microsoft does not seem to be paying much attention to the quality of the games being submitted, and will be passing along a lot of garbage with a few gems. Of course, to a consumer who doesn’t know anything about the game other than its title and a genre, it will be hard to know what to buy and what to avoid. Of course, that’s what those of us here at TheGameReviews are for; we play the crappy games so you don’t have to! Still, it’s hard to forget the whole ordeal with Xbox Live Arcade Titles being delisted. It seems Microsoft isn’t content to learn from past mistakes, and we aren’t even going to dig into the hardware failure rates.