Microsoft decided that it would be a good idea to protect the content that is available via the Xbox Live Marketplace by linking it to the user profile and hardware which means that it would not be possible to go to a friends house, purchase a game there, load it on an memory stick and bring it back to your Xbox to play it there. This also means that you are in for some troubles if your Xbox 360 is replaced with another unit.

Travis got into great detail about the process that follows a replacement. He actually had two broken Xbox 360 systems in the past and this is how everything evolved.

He was sharing the Xbox 360 with his wife who had an account on her own. He quickly realized that he was not able to play the games that his wife purchased and that his wife was not able to play his games anymore both showing up as trial versions instead. It was only possible to play the full games if the user who purchased them would sign in.

After numerous calls with Xbox 360 support he found out that there was actually no way to activate the purchased games again other than creating a “dummy” account which would receive all the points that he ever spend buying stuff on the marketplace.

This is of course very inconvenient if you have purchased a lot of games in the marketplace. There is however more to the story. First, you have to calculate everything by yourself to be sure that you get the points that you spend. The Xbox Live support team has only access to the records of the last year which means that it could mean that there could be a difference between the points that you calculate and the points that they did.

Now if you thought that this was bad have fun with the following: Microsoft wants to transfer the same amount of points that you initially paid for the download. This is pretty bad if the price was raised in the meantime.