Replaced Xbox 360 Troubles
Every now and then a shiny Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming system will stop working and has to be send in for repair and often replacement. Replacing the old Xbox 360 with a new one sounds great on first glance but you have to consider something before you make up your mind on this. If you did download arcade games and other stuff from the Xbox 360 Marketplace you are in for a nasty surprise.
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 is 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 goes 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.
Advertisement
Did you actually read the article Crazie ? We are not talking about the main gamertag but all the other ones.
This is bullshit…I had an Xbox sent it in for repair. They coudln’t fix it and sent me another one. All my downloadable content including my Arcade games were there. Post an article that is factual please.
I’m going through the same thing right now. I had an xbox 360 for almost 1 year and then it died, three red lights. I sent it in for service and they sent me a new/refurbished unit back. I plugged in my HDD and I can only see “Full arcarde games” under my gamertag and not anyone elses on the 360. I’ve deleted the games and redownloaded them as “full” but again other gamertags on the same 360 only see them as “trial”. And here is where the fun begins!! I called MS service and after 4 hours of trying to understand/decipher what the people where trying to say (english speaking reps would be NICE!) They settled on me creating a new temp gamertag so they could credit that account with points so I can redownload the games. The request was put in on Saturday 4/28/07 to add points to the temp gamertag, so we’ll see how long it takes them to get back to me with redeem code. Then I’ll see if the redownloaded games actually show up under the other gamertags.