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. its rediculous, im currently on the pohone waiting for them to answer as i have been on hold 15 minutes now. they put the feature to cancell the automatic renewal on for about a month on the uk site then it was gone. the problem is thast we are just complaining on here and not to somewhere more noticable

    2. I have just found out that my 9 year old grandson has charged over $700.00 worth of stuff on X-Box live. I do not think he realized just the extent of what he was doing. All I know was I signed him up for a year subscription to X-Box live when he first got the X-Box. I had NO IDEA he would be able to charge on MY CREDIT card without MY PERMISSION. I called X-Box and they pretty much said, “too bad”. They told me I should have gone online and removed my card. When I told the (hardly English speaking lady) that I did not know this she said I should have read the user info. It is a RIP OFF and they are doing it on purpose so kids can do this. I am so sick about it as I work hard for my money and can’t afford this.

    3. I appreciate your posting. I think this is the 2nd time I noticed the charge and couldn’t figure why I was being billed. I spent the last preparing for my cross_state move, and before that waiting on the return of my Xbox (red ring 2nd time). Xbox had run a special, get a gold membership for $1.00 for 1 month. The deal was too good to pass up(not knowing that it would cost me a additional $18.00) so thanks for the info and I will can right away

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