40 Days #24: Stem the rising tide of negative Xbox publicity
Lately, as an Xbox owner and a general fan of Microsoft's gaming efforts, I cringe - a lot. I cringe when I hear stories like the one about the gamer who (probably foolishly) sent an Xbox that was signed by a number of game industry figures to be repaired, and got it back sparkling clean - sans all the marker work. Or the recent episode of the Video Game Outsiders podcast where Kyle said he wanted to get rid of his 360 and all the games because he was so frustrated that he couldn't renew his Xbox Live Gold membership due to simultaneous console/website/prepaid card issues. Or all the complaints from people who can't get purchased content relicensed to work properly on the "new" consoles they got back from repair. Or the recent rash of problems cropping up when folks use the gamer profile recovery feature on their consoles. Or Microsoft's own consoles crapping out in the middle of GDC. Or even the news when Microsoft delighted indie developers by cutting royalties for XBLA games published directly through them. Or the massive Xbox Live outage of Christmas 2007 - which still seems to haunt us sporadically in late February. You get the point.
It seems that over the last six months or so Microsoft has become the new Sony - the company that makes all these little missteps, has issues all the time, pisses off gamers, and generally leaves everybody with a bad taste in their mouth. Unfortunately for the Xbox team, Sony has seemingly become the new Microsoft: cheaper hardware, high-def movie format, good games are coming, online services are (slowly) getting somewhere, and fans are excited.
In the Xbox camp, people have doubts about this year, because it just seems that Redmond has squandered its momentum, and Sony is getting much larger in the rear-view mirror. The Xbox doesn't have Nintendo's innocent and squeaky clean image, and many potential buyers will see it and the PS3 as pretty much the same thing. But lately PS3 fans hear a lot of exciting announcements while Xbox supporters read story upon story about how "Micro$oft screws yet another gamer". It gets old after a while, to be honest with you.
To fight Sony's good fortunes, Microsoft need to do a number of things, one of which is to simply become excellent in terms of customer service. Sure, the company is huge, monolithic, and set in its ways learned from supporting its more traditional products like Windows and Office. The Xbox presents probably the first scenario where they needed to have a global support system on a massive scale, which was then impacted squarely by the console's flawed design and resulting reliability issues. They also have millions of online users responsible for probably hundreds of millions of transactions on Xbox Live. Just dealing with such a scale must pose massive headaches.
Yet none of this matters to the customer. To them, if their one and only console fails, it's a 100% failure rate. If they can't access content they paid for, it feels like robbery. If they keep hearing the same complaints from pretty much all their friends, their faith in the product and company is weakened.
And that's what is probably happening all over the globe this year. Gamers may slowly be losing faith in the Xbox as a console and Microsoft as a gaming company. From personal experience I can tell you that I will never fully trust my refurb console to not die at some point. I don't fear it, but I don't expect any better either. And it shouldn't be like that. Customers shouldn't have to lower their expectations into the gutter based on their experiences and news from all around them.
Microsoft needs to decide if it wants to stay in the gaming business, and if so, pretty much bend over backwards at this point to regain the trust of Xbox fans and make sure they stay loyal to the brand. Your console red-ringed? Here's a brand new one. We already wrote off a billion, so we'll step up production, and make extra consoles to give affected gamers. Didn't have an HDMI port on the dead one? We don't care, you'll get the latest new equivalent of what you had before - on us. Died more than once? Replacement, free hot new game of your choice, free six months of online service. Even a letter of apology from somebody with a name. Sounds like a Japanese thing to do, but it would also be polite and make the resolution feel more personal. Major problem like being unable to access all your online content? We'll fix it on our end within a week, and give you a few hundred points to spend.
All that would cost a lot of money, but it really needs to be done. At this point the stories make it sound like the consoles and service are handled by the lowest bidder, and improving the bottom line is all that matters, no matter what the cost in goodwill. And that goodwill - a priceless commodity for any company - can only be regained by establishing a service structure that excels every day, far beyond what anybody expects and what any competitor has in place. Microsoft should be winning customer service awards. Instead it is just feeding the flames on forums, and providing more ammunition to its critics every day.