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:
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.
I just canceled my membership right now. Took no more than five minutes. I think some people just occasionally have bad experiences. I know for a fact when I did support that sometimes I would have a call that lasted seconds, then the next call i would be one the line for half an hour.
The whole Gold thing is a con anyways, you shouldn’t have to pay to play with friends. I just downgraded to Silver, and they didn’t make it easy. Really underhanded, and they can wave goodbye to my money.
Good blog. Post. Thing.
Whether you’re on the phone for five seconds or five hours to do it is irrelevant. Only greedy companies make it easy to sign up for a paid service yet difficult to cancel it and only greedy companies set up membership in a way that REQUIRES auto-renewal to subscribe (it’s stated in their terms of service) unless you use a pre-paid card, which isn’t something they tell you upfront.
Even if you go to Microsoft’s article titled “How to Downgrade to a Silver Xbox Live Membership” (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907817), you’ll notice that it doesn’t actually tell you how to do it. It tells you that if you pre-paid, it’ll happen automatically, but if you used a credit card, it doesn’t tell you that you have to call. It doesn’t tell you anything.
All it says is that if your credit card gets declined when they do the REQUIRED auto-renewal that it WON’T downgrade you to silver, you’ll just carry a balance and keep owing them.
The only way to avoid the issue is not to use a credit card to do any business with Xbox in the first place, which isn’t something that they tell you upfront – and this is how they scam most of their money out of people. They know that most people will think it’s more convenient to use their credit/debit card instead of pre-paid ones, so they know more people will be trapping themselves into the cycle of being charged unless they call and yet tell you nowhere that you NEED to call.
They just suck all over.