Canceling an XBOX Live Gold membership

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I got an Xbox 360 about a year ago with the hope of using it as a media player for my HP Media Vault because it is supposed to be a DLNA-compliant media server. It’s not. You can get it to work by installing Twonkyvision’s server on the Media Vault (which costs another $40), but it won’t stream Divx/xvid-encoded videos, which pretty much renders it useless as a media player in my opinion.

I’m not much of a gamer myself, and so the Xbox 360 hasn’t gotten much use. For some reason that I cannot recall, I decided to upgrade my Xbox 360 silver membership (which is free) to an Xbox Live Gold membership which costs about $7.99/month. I figured I could always just switch back to the free membership if I didn’t use the Gold membership features. After a while of seeing that monthly charge appear on the credit card, I decided to cancel it. I first tried canceling it on-line via the webpage for Live, then through the Xbox console, and wasted at least a half hour before searching on the Internet only to find out that that only way to cancel it is to call up 1-800-4MY-XBOX (1-800-469-9269) to wait to talk to an operator. And that took an additional 18 minutes, most of which time I was on hold.

I really hate it when a company makes such an obvious attempt to hang on to subscription fees that it causes that level of inconvenience when attempting to cancel a service. Signing up took a few minutes and I didn’t need to call anyone, but canceling took 48 minutes from my life. So I’ll post this here for three reasons:

  • To help someone in the future to not waste time looking for an on-line solution to canceling their xbox live membership.
  • To let Microsoft know that this is a really stupid policy.
  • To let any other company that is contemplating a similar strategy not to do it because customers don’t like it.
  • I hope someone Diggs this and maybe it will get the attention of the person Microsoft who can correct the situation. If they do, I’ll gladly remove this from my blog.

    60 thoughts on “Canceling an XBOX Live Gold membership

    1. I agree with this post it didn’t take me that long to cancel but when i talked to the employee on the support line she kept trying to lure me to staying with discounts and free microsoft points

    2. I currently dealing with a similar issue. I didn’t have the money in my account to renew so it put a hold on my account. I went out and bought a three month gold card but that wont work till I pay the sixty dollars on my credit card and they refuse to remove the credit card until its pain even though I dont owe them.

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