Awesome!
That's the greatest news I've heard in awhile about XBLA. This will greatly help Microsoft's revenue from XBLA increase to even greater heights.
It's very simple why they're doing this:
It's very obvious that the Xbox 360 is catering well outside of the old Xbox's userbase. Sales will definately be higher than the Xbox one. This means alot of people will be wanting to be able to purchase old Xbox games. This will allow them to cover those consumers. Where I live, the Xbox is getting increasingly smaller and smaller shelfspace. I cannot just goto the store and randomly buy a copy of Fable or Halo anymore. Not every consumer that wants those old games will do what's needed to buy a older game. VC is the same way: you can always go out and buy a copy of SM64DS if you want: but why not get it from VC?
Overall, this move will be incredibly important. I've been advocating downloadable Xbox games for the past year (read my posts). This is huge. I cannot wait to re-buy Fable, since my copy was lost somewhere. Not only this, with MS offering third party games on the Xbox, this will definately work in their favor for procuring newer games. How many GC and PS2 games to you see on VC and PSN for download? None.
Also, with the huge file sizes of these games, I do believe this will point to them eventually uncapping XBLA download sizes (since I doubt Halo is under 2gb).
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
