So, following my 360′s demise I was looking up the practicalities of using an alternate borrowed machine temporarily until the repair is turned around. I’ve bought a lot of DLC (mostly Rock Band, but also quite a few XBLA games, Gears maps etc), and I know the license for them is associated with the machine, so I looked up the license transfer tool. All seemed pretty sensible and reasonable – I’d have to download everything again, but that’s no big deal.
Until I read the FAQ and realised that you can only transfer your licenses via this mechanism once every 12 months. WTF?
As I understand it, when a console is repaired, the license transfer is done automatically and doesn’t require you to use this tool (and also doesn’t count against your ‘once per 12 months’ limit). However, what I want to do is to use a borrowed machine until the repair comes back, and really I want to take all my DLC with me in both cases. I’m really not sure if trying to do this will cause the automatic transfer on repair not to work, and leave my DLC stranded on the ‘intermediate’ machine – I’m seeing a few scare stories of people being told ‘tough’ by XBox support on this when they’ve tried to juggle 360s (usually because of a failure). Therefore, I may not transfer the DLC to the intermediate machine, which is a PITA because it basically rules out Rock Band, Peggle etc for the intervening period. Gah.
I have to be honest here, I have no idea what the hell Microsoft are thinking on this issue, if they’re truly thinking at all. What difference does it make if a customer wants to transfer their DLC to a new machine more than once in 12 months? Maybe they’re afraid that people will use it to ‘swap’ DLC, but come on – it’s an all-or-nothing process so not really very useful for that in practice. This just seems to be a completely non-customer friendly, administrative nonsense, which given the failure rates on 360 and the fact that other people are going to want to do exactly what I want to do, just seems nonsensical. Way to encourage DLC purchases, guys – it’s exactly this kind of bullshit that makes people afraid of buying it compared to boxed product.
I was feeling pretty good about the data portability on 360 compared to what I considered was a dumb decision on PS3 not to allow swapping of hard drives, but it seems 360 has its share of dumb decisions on storage too. It appears that neither manufacturer has really got their head around giving the customer the freedom to control their own data, which in this case they have paid for and should be able to take it with them. For Christ sakes, Steam is miles better than this (locking content only to a Steam account, not a physical machine), and even so look how much bitching that originally provoked. Were the people making this DLC transfer policy asleep during that whole debate? It certainly seems so. Limiting the transfer of the customer’s own property would be a bad decision at the best of times, but in the light of the 360 failure rates it’s plain ridiculous.
May 3rd, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Ouch, sounds nasty :/
Yeah Steam is awesome, I play Peggle via my steam account in the lounge on my laptop, then log in on my PC upstairs to play Left4Dead etc.
It just works!
May 4th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
While Sony’s not allowing hard disk swapping is inane (Perhaps it’s accidental that save files can’t be swapped? I can’t see any reason for them to intentionally implement it), you can download any game off the store on to 5 different PS3s – and leave it there for anyone to play without logging into your account (Except for Warhawk – where you have to log in to play it).
Not that I’ve tried this, however, since since most of my friends aren’t in to the one downloaded game I have (The superb WipEout HD)
May 5th, 2009 at 4:13 am
I just got the RROD last month and when I got it back from repair, I didn’t have to redownload anything. That does sound like a silly policy, however. I had to go without my 360 completely during this time. I guess my question for MS next would be, if I buy a second console, can I easily share my content between the two?
May 5th, 2009 at 11:51 am
“I was feeling pretty good about the data portability on 360 compared to what I considered was a dumb decision on PS3 not to allow swapping of hard drives”
I don’t understand what you mean, as if seems you just buy a 2.5 SATA, backup data to external (using tools in the PS3 menu), replace the current drive and restore old data.
May 6th, 2009 at 9:15 am
@Jerky: that would be a ‘no’ – you can’t share DLC and the 1x per 12 months stops you from moving it very often.
@WhiteKnight: Sure, if your PS3 still works. If it dies (as my friends did), without you backing it up, you’re completely knackered, because putting the HD in another PS3 wipes it – unlike the 360 where you can just move the HD to the replacement (although this 12 month limit on DLC movement is a PITA). Also, some PS3 games lock the save games to the machine and don’t let you move them anyway – you can tell which ones if you try to move them onto an external drive (while your PS3 is still working).
So there are things the 360 does right (HD portability), some things the PS3 does right (no DLC move restrictions), but they both have major flaws.
May 6th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
I didn’t know that it wiped the drive. That does suck.
Yeah I saw last night when i did a backup that it says that some of the files may not restore onto another system
.
May 6th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
@WhiteKnight – Yeah, I’m the “friend” in question and I can confirm what Steve has said in regards to transfer of hard drives when the PS3 fails. Unfortunately I hadn’t backed up my data and as such, I now can’t access it. So basically, I’m stuffed in that regard.
@Steve – Real sorry to hear about your 360 and also the DLC problems you are getting. I know a couple of other people who have had 360′s fail on them. For one it took months until they got a replacement, the other it was just a couple of weeks. Here’s hoping yours gets back to you soon. I’m sure that you will be missing your Fallout time. Also, we’ll have nothing to do on monday nights before roleplaying
May 6th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Just remember that MS do not actually own a lot of the content. I have heard music companies in particular can be very difficult to broker deals with to move content around.
Did you print out your own label for the return thing? I just returned mine in one of those boxes that hold 3 bottles with my own label stuck on the front.
May 7th, 2009 at 7:55 am
@Baz: if I get desperate I have a spare I can borrow, but it’s an old refurbished launch model (no HDMI) and the DLC transfer nonsense is a pain, so I haven’t bothered yet. I’ll just play stuff on the PC in the meantime!
@Paul: That still doesn’t explain the ‘once every 12 months’ rubbish. Sony are in the same position and they let you move DLC any number of times (via re-download) so why can’t MS?
I just registered the failure on the web and they said they’d send me a box – didn’t give me the option of printing my own label for some reason, even though it was mentioned as a possibility, maybe they rule it out because I’m not on the mainland. I’m not at home this week but so far it seems like nothing has happened yet – in the online system it still says it’s “in the queue to be processed”, it hasn’t even got to the stage where they’re waiting for the console to be returned. Pretty lame. Since I don’t get back until the weekend I’ll have to wait until next week to phone them to ask what’s going on, if they haven’t pulled their finger out by then.
May 8th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
@Paul: I had to print my label out, and provide my own box. Small price, IMO, for a free repair and a quick turnaround. I think I had it back within 10 days, far better than the disclaimed 3 weeks.
May 12th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
@Steve I guess I just remember all the hassle Rock Band had with transferring songs to Rock Band 2. I think there might be a fee involved, and some of the artists didn’t agree at all. Isn’t that cross platform?
I hope you don’t have to be without your console for too long.
May 13th, 2009 at 7:37 am
The whole point of DRM is to increase sales.
When people who previously gave you money would rather pass now than deal with your DRM experience you’ve really lost your way.
I’ve gone through all this with a whole bunch of XBox 360 games I brought with me from the UK that won’t play on my US machine as well as having to setup and maintain two Xbox live accounts.
Leaves such a bad taste in my mouth that I’m tempted to get rid of it entirely.
[)amien
May 13th, 2009 at 10:02 am
@Paul: I think the issue with Rock Band was that they didn’t think of it up-front, and their content licenses were only for physical media, so they had to sign new licenses to be able to essentially turn them into DLC. DLC that’s already downloadable doesn’t have that particular problem. Maybe MS made a similar mistake and only included a ‘single machine’ clause or something in their standard agreement, wheras Sony allows up to 5 (as did iTunes while they still had DRM). Steam allows unlimited machines so long as you’re logged in with the single account. So it’s all down to the agreement and how you frame it, if it’s that that’s preventing MS from allowing DLC transfer more than once every 12 months then, put simply, it’s a crappy agreement that they negotiated. In their defense, they pioneered in the DLC arena and maybe that means their agreements are getting a little long in the tooth – things have changed a lot in the last 2 years around DRM.
@Damien: yep, which is why I’m very glad content publishers are finally realising that DRM is a hiding to nowhere. We need a model where customers buy because it’s convenient, affordable and attractive to do so. Games need to be cheaper, and they need to follow their purchaser around no matter what device they’re on. Steam has one half of that right (the latter half), if they just got their pricing better, they would be the benchmark solution in my book. Sony are probably second since their DLC is more customer-friendly, and MS and Nintendo are dragging up the rear with really rather outdated downloadble content models (and by outdated, I mean 2006 – so not that old really, but things are changing fast, particularly around customer expectation)
I phoned MS support because precisely *nothing* was happening about my repair, and they just re-registered a new repair. I finally got a UPS message saying they’ll pick it up next Monday – so 2 weeks after it originally failed.
May 13th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
@Damien: “I’ve gone through all this with a whole bunch of XBox 360 games I brought with me from the UK that won’t play on my US machine as well as having to setup and maintain two Xbox live accounts.”
Another point for the PS3: No region coding on PS3 games (Region coding still applies to PSX/PS2 games, DVDs and BDs as normal), though game play differences may appear depending upon your console’s region (Most PS3 games are internationally pressed on one disk but apply censorship and such based on console region).