Microsoft doesn’t care about Xbox 360 owners (and what they can do to fix that perception)
When I saw Major Nelson’s blog post a few days ago, which said that anyone with an unauthorized Xbox 360 storage device would not be able to use it after the upcoming update, I was a little irritated by its tone, but I laughed because I thought that mine was a legitimate storage device. Boy, was I wrong.
This is just the latest in a string of Microsoft’s Xbox related stupidity.
Let’s take this story back a month or so. One day I got the idea that I wanted a second Xbox to put in my office so I can play long form, single player video games without disturbing my wife if she wants to watch a movie or some TV, or just read in peace. You’d think that Microsoft would want to make this process easy, because you’re buying a second Xbox, for goodness sake. How can that be a bad thing? You’re giving them more money, and after all, Xboxes are notoriously good at completely, utterly failing without warning. If it’s easy for customers to have multiple Xboxes, it won’t make them as angry when one of them inevitably fails, because they can easily switch to the second while the first is being repaired. I honestly thought that Microsoft would make it easy to use 2 Xboxes.
Naively, and quite excitedly I bought my second Xbox so I could finish up Mass Effect. When I attempted to get it on the network, I found that apparently there are lots of issues with having 2 Xboxes on the same network. Great. Microsoft recommends that you use particular routers (all of them low-priced pieces of junk) to get 2 Xboxes working on the same network. First of all, this is ridiculous because my networking experience/knowledge is at a professional level, I’ve chosen my router hardware for good reasons, and I’m not going to let a piece of client hardware (the Xboxes) dictate what router I get. That’s completely backwards. Use standard protocols and addressing the right way, Microsoft, and you won’t have to recommend specific hardware. It should just work. Oh, and it doesn’t help that the specific hardware that they recommend reads like a laundry list of the exact routers that I would never buy. Linksys, Dlink, ZyXel, NETGEAR? I’ve owned at least one router of all of those brands, and they’ve all died for no apparent reason. Excuse me for wanting to have a router that isn’t cheap and actually WORKS. Finally, I got both Xboxes working on the same network, but I doubt that most people could figure out how. It’s just too complex.
Next, I found out that apparently Microsoft won’t let you copy your game saves/profiles/demos easily from one Xbox to another. I’ve downloaded a ton of content on my old 20GB HD which I wanted to have in the living room, but I wanted to put the Xbox with the larger HD in the living room, because I want to play things like Burnout Paradise, which takes about 8GB of maps to properly install. This meant that I needed to copy a bunch of content from my old 20GB Xbox to my 60GB Xbox. Ok, so I have 2 networked devices connected to the same local network/router. Any sane company would just let you copy things from one device to the other, because they’re encrypted and tied to your profile. Ohhh no, not Microsoft. Microsoft likes to put arbitrary limitations on things that anyone with a reasonable working knowledge of computers half a brain can easily see is idiotic. You can buy a cable that lets you do a one-time transfer of your content, with a laundry list of limitations like only being able to move content from the smaller to the larger drive, only being able to transfer certain files/content, transferring your licenses for content you bought. (Good thing I saw this DRM stuff coming down the road, so I’ve only ever bought one Arcade game, otherwise I’d be angry about that too) Oh wait, no you can’t. This cable is only available if you buy a 120GB Xbox Elite or if you buy a 60GB Xbox hard drive, so my dual Xbox scenario was specifically not supported.
Then, I found out that to use the same profile on multiple Xboxes, you need a memory card, because apparently Microsoft, with all their supposed engineering prowess hasn’t figured out how to sync your profile using their online service. Microsoft, here’s how it could work, since it seems like you need instructions… it’s a freebie. I log on with one Xbox, you sync my profile to Xbox Live, I log on with the second profile from the other Xbox at some other time, you sync the changes back to that profile/Xbox. I try to log on with the profile from 2 places at the same time, you tell me I can’t do that because I’m logged on from another console. It’s not rocket science. Wait, maybe it is. I haven’t seen the code for Xbox LIVE, but I bet it looks like spaghetti.
So here I am, needing a way to move content from one Xbox to the other and to be able to move my profile from one Xbox to the other depending on where I am in the house. The only way to do that seems to be to use a memory card. Fine. I’m pissed about this, but I end up at Best Buy. On the shelf, there are 2 memory cards. One is from Microsoft, is $30 and holds 512MB. Yes, Megabytes. What is this, 2001? For between $8-$15, I can buy a 4 Gigabyte SD card (that’s 8 times the storage capacity). This is total highway robbery. There is absolutely no excuse for only having 512MB of memory on a card in 2009, especially for $30. Next to it, I see this card that offers 4 times the space for $10 more, which seems to be the solution to my problems. In my head I’m thinking, “It’s large enough so I can solve 2 problems that Microsoft created. I can move game demos to the console that I want them on (I can’t do this via any Microsoft methods, because not even one of my game demos will fit on a 512MB card… they’re normally about 800-1000MB), and it’s a memory card, so in the future, I can use it to sneakernet my profile from one Xbox to the other” (which I wouldn’t have to do if Microsoft just synced my profile between consoles). It is literally the only option that I have to do what I’d like to do with the hardware that I purchased/content that I “own”. Fine. Irritated at Microsoft yet again, I plunk down the money thinking that I’ve finally solved the problem. I get home, transfer the content by literally putting 2-3 things on the card, walking to the second Xbox, copying the content off of the card and doing it all over again, the entire time thinking that it’s one of the most absurd things I’ve ever had to do with an electronic device. Finally, I get things the way I want and copy my profile onto the memory card.
Then, I read Major Nelson’s blog post. Eventually I found out that his post meant that the memory card that I just spent $40 on won’t work very soon, due to a mandatory Xbox system update that’s coming. Fine. I’m pissed about this, but it’s par for the course, and I’m used to being raped by Microsoft. I tweet this at Major Nelson: about 14 hours ago “so you’re going to disable my card i’m using to solve a problem YOU CREATED and not give any valid lower priced alternatives?” He direct messages me back, not willing to answer my question out in the open on Twitter, with a one word response: “Correct.”
No attempt to resolve the situation or to even explain it better. I’m a legitimate, long-time customer with 2 Xboxes and a paid subscription to Xbox LIVE, and this is what I get?
I angrily fire back a few tweets, here, here, and here.
In response, I get 2 more DMs.
It took all of that to get a somewhat valid response from him? Whatever. I’m just going to email him a link to this blog post.
Here’s what Microsoft can do to fix the current problems.
1. Give current owners of the Datel card a discount on a legitimate Microsoft memory card. If you’re going to kill our memory cards and force us to buy new ones due to not being able to save our profile to more than one Xbox at a time, the least you can do is bring the price down to something reasonable.
2. Acknowledge that there is a problem with the limitations around being able to move your content/profile around between multiple systems that you own. You guys made a system with the highest failure rates in the industry, so it’s not a crazy thought that someone would have 2 Xboxes.
3. Acknowledge that some people ignorantly bought this card to solve problems that you have created, not knowing that apparently the card they paid $40 or $50 could be disabled at any time causing them to have to buy ANOTHER CARD of lower capacity, and explain why you’re going after your own customers instead of attacking the company that makes this device.
4. Fix it. This entire hardware system of arbitrary limitations is broken and it needs to be fixed. Stop penalizing customers for solving problems that you created. I’m not hacking my Xbox or trying to cheat, I’m just trying to use the hardware that I bought without drawing blood to do simple tasks like copying a file from one place to the other.
Don’t get me wrong, the Xbox is definitely the lesser of 2 evils in my book (I own 2 Xboxes, a PS3 and a Wii, and the Xbox has the best games/selection by FAR), but if they don’t stop shooting customers in the foot every other week, we’re going to hobble somewhere else. This needs to stop.
