November 7, 2008 

M$ X-box 360 Auto Renewal Rip Off

Here’s the long winded tale of how I saved money on my 360 renewal. Hopefully you can learn to do this the EASY way unlike my way which was definitely the irritating way… So here’s what happened:

  • MISTAKE #1 – I did not change my payment type
  • MISTAKE #2 – My credit card expired
  • MISTAKE #3 – See MISTAKE 1
  • MISTAKE #4 – I was autorenewed and billed on a credit card that doesn’t exist

So after getting an email saying we couldn’t bill you. I went online and picked up a prepaid card (SMART, VERY SMART). Unfortunately there is a problem. A very needless one.

The Problem

Once your credit/debit card has been billed there is NO WAY to change the payment type. The option is there but when you enter in the code on the card, it says to contact customer sservices (or just rejects it if you try on xbox.com).

The Idiotic

Here’s an interesting challenge – try removing your credit card details from the 360 or xbox.com. You CAN’T. You can change to another debit or credit card but if you don’t want MS to have your card details, once you’ve put your card details in there is NO WAY to remove them! I found this out THE HARD WAY. I rang up M$ customer services and foolishly spoke to accounts and billing, now I’m not trying to insult all Americans, but the idiot American girl who really didn’t sound bothered while dealing with my call (I work in a front line call center btw – I know a thing or two about customer service and this was a disgrace) told me to just remove the credit card from my account on xbox.com (which firefox reports has an invalid certificate by the way – it REALLY didn’t want me to go to the page – threw up a number of warnings). Anyway, after 10 minutes navigating round the billing section in circles as it would only replace the credit card not remove it I gave up. Why? IT CAN’T BE DONE and tells you to call them!

Let’s Try That Again

I rang M$ again and this time went the cancel my account route. This time I ended up with the polar opposite, an Indian who was BRILLIANT. She a) Understood my problem b) Cancelled my Live account and then re-enabled it so I could use the prepaid card – i.e. completely resolving my issue and c) was not only polite, also talked to me about games. Ok she was trying to sell Gears 2 but hey, it passed the time while she did the account maintenance.

The moral of this story is simple

Be smart, change your payment method for X-Box 360 Gold from credit card while you can. Automatic renewal costs £39.99. Buying a renewal card on play.com costs £35. Buying a renewal card from a play trader costs £27.99 or going direct to one of the traders is even cheaper £26.99 if you use http://www.instantxboxlive.com I went via a trader but next time will just go direct for that little extra saving. Took about 4 hours for the email with the prepaid code in to come.

Final Rant

So don’t pay more for the convenience of auto-renewal, don’t think for a minute either that it’s for server costs either. If it was recovering your profile wouldn’t take 20 minutes on a 20mb line for a 6mb profile. Nope, all we’re really doing is paying to replace all the RRoD 360′s that break because M$ used cheap parts…

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  • nikobe

    Awesome our first proper rant :) and good advice in there.

    Yeah I payed for my brothers first year of gold via credit card on his xbox then found I wouldn’t get the card off afterwards, only way round for me was to password lock any payments via parental control but I doubt thats thats the easiest way. All in all its a crap system for the web 2.0 age.

  • http://www.the-cwf.com sideswipe

    Yup, and for anyone that still thinks we pay for server costs with that subscription I have 3 words for ya. Games for Windows. Yup, you play the same game on your Windows PC and you won’t have to pay a subscription for playing it online (and you’ll be getting more or free DLC in some cases). Not that it’d make me use Windows but further hammers home the point that M$ are abusing 360 owners.