Microsoft - You've lost a customer for life.

You may not care. Sure, i purchase consoles for myself - two sons and plenty of digital content but in reality i probably represent around £900 per annum to you over the course of a console generation, i'm hardly going to damage your earnings report...

My Xbox One "Day One" edition stopped working, just won't power on. Despite raising it with support and then escalation with the customer advocacy team, the only option available to me is a "Paid" repair. Oddly i expected my console to last longer than 3 years
before kicking the bucket.

I suppose what frustrates me most is not that my only option is a paid repair - but that despite being a loyal customer who buys at launch and spends a considerable amount i also helped out Microsoft years ago (When i had my 360). I identified a glitch where
you could circumvent the Xbox Live subscription and still retain gold, i posted a YouTube video (Now at 1.5 million views) showing i had done it but wouldn't release how i had done it. It got picked up by a few big tech news sites. I contacted Microsoft, explained
the defect (I actually had a friend who worked at Lionhead, so he posted it in their internal forum).

Now i never received anything for my help, i didn't expect to. I just felt it was the right thing to do, rather than tell the internet how to do it and create a mess that Microsoft would need to clear up. Despite highlighting this to the customer advocacy team
(Already showing them the YouTube video / Articles which reference my GamerTag), hoping that by saying "Look, i did you a favour? Don't think you could do me one in return and fix my console for free" i literally got sent and they quoted Microsoft Service
Agreement, Section 18 which talks about "Unsolicited Feedback". I honestly couldn't be believe it., real sense of "community" there.

Anyway, i bought an Xbox One S 1TB. I'm not paying for a repair out of principle to be honest. Unfortunately i'm far too invested in Xbox digital content to switch horses in this generations race. However, the next generation i'll be looking elsewhere to spend
my money.

:)

 

Account support

Unfortunately if you're banned for life, you've lost all that is attached to your account: games, gold, avatar, gamertag, ...

 

Newest update (11 December) not downloading -Status Code: 42FE-0000-3080-0506-8007-2EE2

I agree. This console I've returned for repair once and now this. Every time there's a download i'm waiting for an eternity or it wont load at all.

CONGRATULATIONS MicroSoft! You've lost yet another customer. Sure glad I didn't get the One. What kind of nightmare will that be in a year, I wonder.

 

"Anyway, i bought an Xbox One S 1TB. I'm not paying for a repair out of principle to be honest. Unfortunately i'm far too invested in Xbox digital content to switch horses in this generations race."

The subject title is misleading. If Microsoft had lost a customer for life, shouldn't you have done the principled thing and backed away now, and *not* to have bought an Xbox One S? Obviously, you've stated that in future you might choose otherwise, but
if we're honest and the allure of an upmarket Project Scorpio delivers on everything that's promised, wouldn't you be just as likely to invest again?

In respect of the subscriptions glitch, yes, that does appear to be a noble move on your behalf, and your beneficence should have been acknowledged somewhere along the line. However, the plain truth of the matter is that these mega corporations can fend
for themselves. I recall a time in the not-too-distant past when Sony got trolled by a bunch of hackers, taking their network offline for nearly a month, but Sony arguably won back customer support by incentivizing new subscribers or offering games-for-gratis
to those already on the hook. The irony is that after the corporation bounced back, they now have a reputation for punishing people for the slightest of infringements.

"Oddly i expected my console to last longer than 3 years before kicking the bucket."

No, not really. It's called "planned obsolescence", or a dependency on anything that's shiny and new. Before I became invested in Xbox, I was a SEGA aficionado from the get-go. Therefore, when my shiny new Sega Dreamcast bit the bullet after only EIGHTEEN MONTHS,
I wasn't best pleased. I simply *had* to replace it whether I liked it or not. But here's the thing: for the time I'd already spent with the product, along with my six-day per week regime of protracted gaming sessions, I actually did receive value for money!
Plus, by the time I needed to replace it, a retail 'economy of scale' had kicked in whereby the cost of entry was lower. Not to mention a shiny new console ships with a free controller, so there's that psychological boost to offset the loss.

Has Microsoft lost a customer for life? Maybe. But I certainly wouldn't bet *my* life on it! Cheers, thedalmeny!

 

I agree. It appears that OP is looking for "favors" in a "I scratched your back, you should scratch mine" fashion, but you're not going to find it in a business the size of MS. Why would you even think you would? If people found out somebody got a "free
repair" because they helped out MS, we'd have people literally trying to find problems to exploit just to claim MS "owes" them something. Not to mention everybody imaginable would be claiming "I helped them fix problem X" just to get special treatment if/when
they needed it.

While I do agree you should've gotten some acknowledgement, I say that you should've gotten no less than that, but certainly no more. Or, if they did decide to show a token of appreciation it should be offered by MS at their discretion, not called in like
a favor by you. Otherwise, we'd have people coming out of the woodwork, making more and more unreasonable demands because they did MS a favor at some point.

I'm not much of a fan of "planned obsolescence" myself, but I understand the reason it exists. That set aside, there are far too many factors both human and environmental that can affect the lifespan of any device. Expecting a console to last longer than
3 years is irrelevant unless everyone's console "mysteriously" dies at the 3 year mark.