In my last post I mentioned that I couldn’t access my purchased Xbox Live Arcade titles when offline, which pissed me off quite a bit. I thought it was a glitch, but no: this is the way it’s supposed to work. I almost can’t believe what I’m reading.
I’ve always been opposed to DRM, but this is really going too far. The thing is, you can play XBLA games you’ve purchased offline, but only on the console you first downloaded them on. This wouldn’t be an issue if they tied them to the media they were downloaded to, which I could tolerate a lot better, since the 360 HDDs are not that prone to breakage, apart from the inherent long-time unreliability of HDD technology. Considering that it’s because of their unreliable hardware that I’ve had to switch consoles, I’m getting shafted here.
I suppose I need to take this up with their customer service again. FFS, they should be paying me for the time I have to spend on getting the console to work. You got a lot more damage control to work on apart from spending that 1 BN USD on the red ring of death issue, Microsoft.
Addendum
Having called the local Xbox support center, they insist that the XBLA games are not tied to the console. They asked me to try using the HDD on another console to see if the games could be played offline there. I’ll do that, sure, if it helps to identify the probem. They will reimburse my used MS points so I can re-purchase the games and/or send me a new HDD, but I would lose all of my progress on the games that obviously already are on the HDD. So confusing, why can’t these things just work?
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