Replacement 360 XBOX Live Arcade Woes

I hate DRM. I hate hardware that doesn't work. I really hate it when hardware that doesn't work combined with hardware-based DRM, makes for more hardship on what's an already pisspoor situation.

As I posted, my 360 developed the Red Ring of Death (the rather vague general hardware failure in my case) and I sent it off to Microsoft for repair. Well, to make a long story short, M$ sent me a replacement instead of repairing my console, which makes sense, but also a lot of needless bother. As most would know/guess, Live Arcade games are DRM-coded. This DRM basically associates the Live Arcade games with your gamer profile AND the hardware upon which you downloaded them. While this is good in the sense that you can take your games on a memory unit to play on someone else's 360, provided you're logged into Live, well, needless to say, it creates something much less savory when your hardware has been replaced.

Basically, whenever I go to play my Live games, I have to be logged in. No more can I play them without a profile loaded, no more can another profile be loaded. If either of those circumstances are in effect, games appear to be in trial mode, so basically I have to have my Live Profile logged-in. Problem is, I have to actually be logged-in to Live and ONLINE to do it. I basically connect wirelessly through a wireless bridge via an ad-hoc network (no router), so basically this means that my PC has to be on for me to play the full versions of the games I've paid $5-$10 each for. That's 31 downloaded games, only one of which was a freebie. Like I said, I hate DRM.

Needless to say, I'm a little bit miffed. Apparently, since my console was under warranty and sent back to Microsoft, there's a way for me to go about remedying this, but it's rather complicated (basically I have to create a silver Live account, at which point, if everything checks out, they'll credit that account with enough Live Points to download the content again on the new machine, thus registering them with the new hardware). For those people who thought they were being smart by purchasing an extended warranty handled by the retailer (such as Gamestop, Best Buy or EB), they're basically up the creek without a paddle, and will be told as much by Microsoft support. To show a little more about Microsoft's commitment to their customers, apparently so little forethought has been put into this little problem that those who upgrade to the XBOX 360 Elite also have the issue, and like the extended warranty purchasers, they have little recourse other than to just deal with it. I know it might seem like a trivial thing to some (you can of course still play them, you just have to be connected to Live), but what about those gamers who took their 360 over to a friend's house to download those games (how I first started doing it, until I found a way to do the ad-hoc thing with my dial-up connection...yup, you read that right) and can now no longer play them since they have no way of logging-in to Live every single time they play.

Considering the degree of hardware failures users have experienced, I'd say their customer base has been about as loyal and patient as any could be. This is another slap in the face, and Microsoft really needs to come clean and find solutions to these issues, especially those that are a product of their oversight. You hear stories about people being on their 3rd 360. I was skeptical about it at first, but now that I'm a member of the Red Ring Fraternity, I guess it's opened my eyes a bit. Microsoft can still come out on this, but it won't by ignoring their customers and denying hardware issues, especially when it's become the laughingstock that is XBOX 360 hardware reliability & satisfaction.