Friday, January 4, 2008

Angry Xbox 360 Users Appeased

If you tried to curl up on the couch with a few Xbox 360 games over the holiday season, your day likely ended more in frustration than relaxation and excitement. The system was experiencing problems during the last week in December, resulting in many players who couldn't log online to the Live service for multi-player game play. However, Microsoft has been quick to appease its upset game-geeks by reportedly offering a free game download to all Xbox Live subscribers around the world, valued anywhere from US$5 to US$20. Further details will be available in the coming weeks.

Xbox Live General Manager Marc Whitten attributes the connectivity issues to a large number of new users trying to get online at the same time. I can believe it, given that video games, and likely Xbox Live service subscriptions, were hot gift items this year. What do you do after opening presents and stuffing your face with turkey? Kick back with some video games! Nevertheless, players I know were confused: why were routers, Internet connections, and PCs working, yet connection to Xbox Live wasn't?

I have to commend Microsoft on its quick response to the issue, and fully admitting its disappointment in having inconvenienced its customers. As for the upset gamers, I say as long as you didn't see a blue screen of console death, take the free game that's being offered and appreciate that these things can and will happen.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just curious: Is this going to make it better for the poor service recently? Or do they need to do more?

Anonymous said...

Okay, so if they gave everyone a free month that would be fine. But that would cost them $10 million out of pocket. If they reimbursed everyone for the week or so of outage/spotty service, that would be a couple of million dollars. So instead they give away some game that no onw would want anyway and you write a story saying that users are "appeased"? I don't think so.

Anonymous said...

Lame

Anonymous said...

I am tracking each day(every 10 minutes) the status of xbox live, and creating
statistical images, this shows the biig picture on how "live" xbox-live actually is :)

http://www.acddv.com/

Also these statistics are available for the public as-well