http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?Dispatch=Display&cId=3161903

"As part of an early morning presentation walking developers and publishers through the Xbox Live Arcade process at Microsoft, the company briefly addressed the size limit companies must work within in order to have the games appear on their service. Originally, Microsoft capped games at 50MB so they could be downloaded to a memory card.

At the Game Developers Conference this year, however, the company tripled that cap to 150MB, allowing titles like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night to appear. However, at Gamefest 2007, the company made no indication that size will be changing, even as Sony starts to introduce much larger downloadable content onto the PlayStation Network (see: Warhawk).

"It [the 150MB cap] really lets you focus on the innovation," said Katie Stone, senior games program manager and founding member of XBL Arcade."

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That seems like an interesting way to say that they don't want to limit the XBLA experience for anybody who only has their memory cards by claiming that a game wont be innovating unless it's 150 megs or less.

The Warhawk beta supposedly clocked in at under or around 700-800 megs, Socom: Confrontation will be similar to Warhawk though we don't know it's size, GT:HD is 632 megs and GT: Prologue is on it's way, Super Stardust HD is 300 megs, Motal Kombat II is 248 megs, and while it is less than 150 megs Flow comes in at 126. If anybody has Calling All Cars, would you mind posting how many megs it is?

So what do you think?

To be fair, MS said the same thing when asked about increasing the size from 50 to 150.

However, I would think that having the limit is a stupid move: just because a game stays small doesn't mean it's better or worse, but that your pidgeonholing certain types of games on the XBLA network.

However, it's entirely possible that MS might one day make a new XBL network and maybe do a "Xbox Downloadable Game" and have no restrictions for full story-based games, rather than XBLA games that are mostly focused on multiplayer only.

I would hope that MS either does a full game network (how are they working with Namco on Beautiful Katrami!?) or delete the 150mb limit.

I don't know, they just seem to be stabbing themselves with any storage related topic recently.

Has any game developer actually asked for an increase to the 150meg limit?