Should Microsoft Pay Compensation For Xbox Live Outages?

After a long hard tiring day of work or whatever, sometimes you just want to get home, make yourself a cup of tea or coffee, turn on either your Xbox One or 360, stick on your current multiplayer game of choice or maybe put your feet up and chill out to a movie or listen to some music.  But before you can get the max out of your Xbox console and enjoy any of the above on it, you first need it to be connected to Xbox Live and to play multiplayer games online you need to have a Gold account.  The thing with an Xbox Live Gold account is that it's a paid for subscription service.  Some people pay by the year, some people pay by the month.  It doesn't matter how you pay for Live, what's important here is that you PAY.

So when you do finally get home from your hard day and find that your night has been destroyed because although your internet connection is all good, your Xbox Live service is down and your console is now reduced to the bare bones of what it can do.  This pisses people off, I myself have been pissed off on occasion because of these outages.

The problem here is that as a paying customer you have nowhere to go.  If your internet connection is broken, you can contact your service provider and maybe get the problem sorted.  If said problem continues for a period of time you, can ask for a discount on your next bill as a form of compensation for the loss of service you have suffered.

With Xbox Live there is no one you can contact to try get it fixed or seek compensation from, you just have to sit and wait for Microsoft to sort the issue out in the back end and hope they do it as quickly as possible.

So what do people do, people do what we all do best in the modern age, we get on social media and voice our opinions and concerns to the world and it a lot of cases we just give out and complain.

After the few Live outages last month, the discussions on social media became so intense that Larry Hyrb, Xbox Live's Major Nelson decided that he should respond to a thread on Reddit about this very topic.  In reply to the concerns raised on the thread about possible compensation for outages, he had the following to say.

“I’ve taken some of the more thoughtful comments and shared them with a few folks on the Xbox team to make them aware of this request. That’s about all I’ve got right now – but when I am back in the office I am going to stop by and chat 1:1 with some folks about this as well.”

I also think Microsoft need to be more upfront regarding the reasons why these outages are happening in the first place.  A lot of people have private banking details and personal information contained within their accounts on Xbox Live and Microsoft needs to be doing all it can to reassure customers their information is completely secure. I certainly don't want to alarm anyone here, I am a paying Gold Live account holder for over 8 years and I've never once had a single hint of a problem with security on my account.

Microsoft has a massive and loyal fanbase as regards to Xbox Live and for me, although I completely understand that an enormous complex system like Live is going to have issues from time to time, I also believe that Microsoft could acknowledge that paying customers are being left a little short because of these outages and maybe give a free day of Xbox Live subscription here and there as a little thank you for people's patience.