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.
The x box live accounts are extremely difficult to cancel ,My son opened an account and used it for one month, now they are asking me all this detailed info in order to cancel it.
I ‘ve been getting billed 7.99 twice each month for 6 months the company even had the nerve to tell me I would have to file a fraud claim to get the charges off my card.signed.. Livid
Got a 1mth subscription to play Gears of War 2 with a buddy for a few weeks before January, as then I will be studying and won’t have time. I didn’t like that the confirmation email said auto-renew, so I called the 1-800 number. Was on the phone with the rep and gave him all my info, saying I wanted to downgrade back to silver. He was pretty nice, put me on hold for maybe 4mins, then gave the same info to a billing agent. (Don’t know why they need it twice but oh well…)
Billing agent was happy to help, he told me that my Gold is good for the rest of the month and then I won’t be charged anymore and it will be a silver membership.
Here’s hoping that is true. If it isn’t then I will be most unhappy, but so far I have nothing to complain about. I think I will stick to pre-paid cards now.
(P.S. called from Canada, don’t know if that makes a difference)
Thanks for the help! I could have wasted much more time. The hold music was a horrible noise, but I only had to wait about 8 minutes. Geeeez Microsoft. Evil Empire!