Microsoft Giving Xbox Live Users a Free Game

Earlier this week we covered the Xbox Live outages over the holidays. Several users have pointed out that Microsoft has acknowledged its lack of performance, and is now offering a free game to compensate its users. Unfortunately for Microsoft, disgruntled patrons have already filed a class action lawsuit over the recent difficulties. Quoting the PC World article: "Xbox Live general manager Marc Whitten said that the problems with Xbox Live downtime were caused by an influx of new users who had gotten an Xbox 360 over the holidays. It's been a record-setting season for Xbox Live. 'This included our largest sign-up of new members to Xbox LIVE in our 5 year history and just yesterday you broke the record for the single biggest day of concurrent members ever on the service,' said Whitten."

Same old story...

[Life2Short]

Years ago I used to play Asheron's Call. In those days, Microsoft owned the game, and instead of logging directly onto the servers you had to pass through Microsoft's "Gaming Zone." This was later extended to requiring Internet Explorer to access a Microsoft Passport account to log in to the Gaming Zone so you could get to Asheron's Call. Thanks to this convoluted system, there were a LOT of connection problems that weren't addressed until Microsoft finally sold the game back to Turbine, and you could log directly onto the Turbine servers.

Good luck XBOX Live customers, and don't hold your breath...

Re:Problems still not resolved as of last night...

[Anonymous Coward]

You think that's bad? I was playing Geometry Wars last night, and FINALLY got over a million points, something I've been trying to do for well over a year.

I scored 1.5 million points, got two achievements...

and the leaderboard wasn't updated. It still has me at 700,000.

Imagine if you actually made it through some CoD4 and didn't get the experience points/challenges marked done and had to start over....

Seriously, it's been over two weeks and MS keeps saying that this stuff is fixed. I'm on my 3rd 360, and it's about to be the fourth...for as fun as its games are, MS seems determined to ensure that the 360 inconveniences its owners and push them towards the Wii and PS3.

pretending they didn't see this coming?

[v1]

It's not like this was a SURPRISE to them. They SELL the units, the have absolute control over how many units are sold. If your netgame people say the current network can support 80,000 users, you DON'T SELL 200,000 UNITS until you have upgraded your network. (numbers fabricated but you get the idea)

This was entirely their responsibility, and I cannot believe they did not see this coming. What it came down to is they wanted to do a money grab for the holidays so they made as many units as they possibly could, to hell with the network until we get past christmas then we'll divert resources from production to upgrade the net so they can USE the product.

Not saying it's unexpected, just shameful is all. Nothing new there in business.

They paid for it

[mangu]

It's just a gaming console

The basic idea of money is that one dollar is just as good as another. If the customers paid for something they didn't get, it doesn't matter what was being bought, they have the right to be compensated.

Re:Problems still not resolved as of last night...

[Peil]

Got to say last night was the first time in about 2 weeks I've had a chance to even look at Live, and boy was it painful.

Took about 10 minutes, and several dozen attempts to even get signed in, once in the whole thing was running painfully slowly. Generally not very good, especially as I was seeing lobby issues on PGR4 BEFORE Christmas.

Looking around the forums there are a lot of guys over on PA who are maning that every live user will get the free download, and complaining that Silver members will get the same 'compensation' as Gold. You have to agree that at some point the users who pay to play (roughly £40 a year over here on Airstrip One) are going to complain more loudly as they are the ones who cannot play online, as opposed to accessing marketplace content, but to moan about a 400 point XBLA POS does seem a bit cheap.

What is worrying is that these issues have been going on for so long (4 weeks is a figure I'm hearing a lot), surely even MS would think that they should maybe chuck a bit more coal on the boiler?

tsk tsk tsk....

[3seas]

...a great promotion is to fail and blame it on popularity abundance.

Do we have any examples of high user load being successfully maintained?

He's full of crap.

[tgd]

These problems started two weeks before the Christmas holidays. In my case on the first reboot after the winter software update was installed.

They're making excuses. It has nothing to do with Christmas gifts.

As if they were the only ones with trouble...

[Kjella]

On Christmas day a friend of mine had invited me over to play Bubble Bobble on his Wii, he was going to buy and download it on VC. He spent forever getting thrown out again and again trying to buy some Wii points, and then again trying to access the game library. It finally worked but it was not a very fun experience. Bubble bobble was though, but nothing beats the old version we knew on C64. At any rate this seems more serious but I think everyone's servers take a hit at Christmas. It's the console version of slashdotting, all the kids who got their console for Christmas coming online all at once.

Re:They paid for it

[mangu]

And Microsoft is giving them a free game

I said a dollar is as good as any other, but a game isn't necessarily as good as any other. FTFA, "Whitten stopped short of identifying the game or when, exactly, it would be available". If I paid for a service I would want exactly that, not a game as a replacement, no matter the game's price.

Besides, considering that Microsoft is offering a free download, they are giving away nothing but some downloaded bytes, which their crappy service should have provided in the first place. It's not as if they were having the expense of printing a DVD or something like that.

The *value* of the game they are giving isn't the same as the *price* of the same game in the market. If you give me something that costs you a few cents to produce, and I wouldn't be willing to buy, you cannot argue that you are giving me the full shelf price of that product.

Live is still broken

[byronblue]

I am far from amused with a service that I pay for. It's been over a week now and I am not able to recover my gamer tag. What does that mean? Well not being able to recover my gamer tag means I cannot play any of my saved games or any have any achievements count (yeah big deal). Basically my XBox is rendered useless (I only play games on it). The worst part is that Microsoft has made no attempt to fully explain to its customers why and when Live is going to be working properly again. The support page says that it's "up and running", yet when recovering my gamer tag I get "signup to not available". I guess my biggest question is how can something be so damn broken that it takes over 3 weeks to fix??? Someone really screwed something up really badly over there. I don't give a rats ass about a free arcade game, I just want my gamer tag back! If Sony can make their online experience more compelling I'd actually start playing my PS3 (got it for free as a gift). XBox gaming is nothing without XBox Live.