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."

Comments

Problems still not resolved as of last night...

[toupsie]

Last night was another terrible night of XBOX Live gaming. COD4 was unplayable online. At one point, while designated as host, my XBOX froze, unfroze, froze, unfroze and so on for 10 minutes. I couldn't even back out being host. The only way i would have been able to get control over my system was to turn it off. I didn't just to see how long XBOX Live was going to keep my XBOX 360 hostage to its poor performance while surfed for prices for SONY's PS3 gaming system. Now that nearly every major motion picture company has abandoned HD-DVD for BluRay and it appears Apple is going BluRay, the PS3 is looking to be a more desirable platform. I am really not satisfied with the response that Microsoft has put out and giving me a P.O.S. XBLA game I will never play for losing two weeks of paid service that still doesn't appear to be fixed isn't convincing me to stay with Microsoft -- not to mention the three times I have sent my XBOX 360 in because of the Red Ring of Death.

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

[epiphani]

I copied the data and sent it to a friend. Lucky for me, I was able to find the source again.

here

There are several other references to it onliine as well.

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

[ashridah]

Sure, but are you working for a company with procedures regarding purchasing? You don't just wander down to your local store and say "i'd like a rackmount server plskthx" (or even give dell/whoever a call). You tell ops "we need more capacity for ." they say "okay, we've checked all of the current vendors whom we can support, and your options for spending are X, Y or Z." You go "hm, we can afford NxX or MxZ, but Y's support contract is too small. We'll go with M because it's > N."

5-10 days later, ops has the servers. Then ops gets building services to ship them to the labs. Then ops load tests the servers. Then they set it up with management tools, setup backups, and add it to the automation pool. This is about 2-3 weeks later, at best. (remember, ops needs to do this for every other department as well as yours, which for Microsoft, is a *LOT* of departments.)

Then you finally get your hands on it, and can roll your software out, scale test it, etc, fix bugs, make sure that it's solving the problem, go back to the drawing board, because it probably isn't, get software patches in place, etc, and then finally organise the new equipment to go live.

By now, 2-3 months have passed. This is the same in EVERY company I've worked for, including microsoft. The process exists to make sure that people don't get screwed. The problem is, the process is slow, and that's probably unavoidable.

Keep in mind that XBox is a loss leader. They don't have craploads of cash to throw at hardware, because they're living on what is effectively negative margins, in the hopes that licensing will catch up in a few years. Compare this to windows or office, where the profits are enough to fund multiple other new startup projects at once (Including the one I work for, thanks office! :) )

So when someone underestimates the amount of xboxes that are going to get sold over Christmas, you're suddenly finding yourself short to the tune of N% of your required capacity, because you were saving money by operating at 80% instead of the 50% you'd be looking at if you could afford it. Keep in mind that the money from retailers doesn't filter back for a few months, as far as accounts is concerned.

Also, I'm willing to bet that bandwidth isn't the problem so much as simple scaling. This could well be something that just requires some better thinking on the software side, but I don't know much about the inner workings of xbox live's server-side stuff.

Anyway, to put all this into simple words. A bigger company doesn't necessarily mean that scale's an easy problem to deal with.

ash

Daily statistics of down time XBOX-live

[cemaykan]

I am tracking each day(every 10 minutes) the status of xbox live, and creating statisical 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 Cem Aykan

SLA?

[HockeyPuck]

When you buy a XBOX and sign up for XBOX Live, is there a SLA (Service Level Agreement) that guarantees uptime/accessibility? So under what grounds would you be able to file a class action lawsuit?

Re:SLA?

[MrJynxx]

SLA's are generally created between the internal technology group and the internal users(ie. the business). Now I haven't read through the agreement but i can almost guarentee you there is no mention of guarenteed uptime for xbox live.

Also it's considered a binding contract according to the ITIL definition of service level management for services provided to *external* clients (ie, everybody who uses xbox live). So that is probably why they're giving away a free game in order to avert the class action suit due to this binding contract.

yes I know, I'm nitpicking on the definition of an SLA :)

Re:Microsoft Blasting

[KillerBob]

3. Xbox live is one of the few services that actually has a customer service line. IN THE US. Your dell, dude, doesn't even have that.

Psst.... Yes they do. well, not in the US. But in Canada. All XPS technical support for North America is done out of a call center in Ottawa, Ontario. That's for the US and Canada, in both English and French, Spanish is done out of Panama. Likewise, for the business line of products... that is Optiplex, some Dimension, Vostro, and Latitude systems, it's all done in NA.

Otherwise, I agree with you fully. Quite aside from that... a free video game is probably worth a lot more to the end user than any settlement they'd see out of a class action suit. And the fact that MS has already offered the video game of their own volition probably means that any class action would get thrown out of court. It's pretty hard to prove damages when you've already been offered a freebie that's worth more than the cost of a month's subscription, let alone the 5 days that it was actually out.

Obligatory disclaimer... I have an @dell.com e-mail address. :)

Re:They paid for it

[Kalriath]

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 No, they're giving you something you would otherwise not have received without paying for it. Just because it's downloaded, does not mean that it's value is zero. And no, their "crappy service" should [i]not[/i] have provided those particular bytes to you in the first place, not without paying extra.

To Microsoft, there is a very real cost involved in providing you a free game - if you ever took economics, you would have learned about "Opportunity Cost" - where basically giving you the game costs them the full cost of the game as they have given up the opportunity to charge you for it. Although the opportunity cost decreases on average as it encounters people who would otherwise not have bought it anyway, the chance of it approaching zero is virtually non-existent.

Oh, and provisioning it to silver members too incurs an actual physical cost, as silver members do not contribute to the upkeep of the network, therefore any bandwidth they use is sunk cost (after all, Microsoft DOES have to pay for it).

You're just trying to justify why they should give you something for free, when in reality they have no obligation to give you anything at all (try reading to terms and conditions of service).

Though, it would be better just giving the value of the arcade game in MS points and letting us decide what to put it towards, that'd probably go down better.