Artless Gamer

A few updates ago Microsoft added the Games on Demand option to the Xbox360 Dashboard. On top of that, if you have an Xbox Live account, you can also add games to your download queue straight from the Xbox.com Marketplace. Good going, Microsoft. We love the feature and it makes downloading new titles, add-ons or other things much easier when we can’t be in front of our consoles.

However, not all titles are available in all regions. Some titles are region blocked and won’t allow you to download the selected content. If you try to download such a title you may get a message looking something like this “The game’s region does not match this console” or some variation of it. Besides Major Nelson’s blog, which gives a small hint as to which region can download a certain piece of content, there is very little indication as to the availability of a title.

The other day, Streifenhecht decides to download Assassin’s Creed from Games on Demand on his Xbox 360. No luck. Didn’t work. The same thing happened to me when I first tried to download Mass Effect. A few days later I decided to try again – I have no clue why I tried it again but this time around the download started and I was able to download Mass Effect without any issues. The same counted for Fable II. When I told Streifenhecht about this at work, he went to Xbox.com because he knew he could download games from the web based marketplace, as well.

Lo and behold, it worked. The download started and all he had to do was to finish work, go home and start playing.

Really happy with the low price of 30$, he goes home, turns on the TV, waits for the Dashboard to appear and freezes. An error window has been waiting for him for hours, declaring “Content cannot be downloaded”. WTF?

To make a long story short, this is what happened. At work we need proxy servers. Useful little tools that allow you to browse the internet with foreign IP addresses. We do this all the time in order to see geo targeted ad content – the both of us work in SEO and online marketing. When he went to the Xbox.com marketplace to make his purchase, his IP addresses identified him as a user with a US IP address. Of course the marketplace allowed him to download the content and the download queue was initiated accordingly.

However, after the download is finished, the Xbox makes one last request to the server to finish things off. This is where things go awry. The Xbox wasn’t online through a proxy server – only the PC from where the purchase was made went through a proxy server. So when the Xbox “broke out” on the server side, it ID’d itself with an IP that wasn’t eligible for this title. The download failed and the game, while being on the Xbox’s HDD could not be played.

The problem with all this is not really the fact that he can’t play the game, now. The real problem is that he paid for the title. His MS Points were deducated – something that doesn’t happen if the region block kicks in under normal circumstances.
This is where the support case starts. First of all, I want to be clear about this – if you have to deal with support through email and you are in the US, don’t bother. I know from Major Nelson’s podcast that they have a real team of support guys sitting there, taking care of every inquiry manually. I believe that. However, I have been in the support industry myself and what we saw from these guys was what we already knew. They appear to be only reading half of your inquiry, miss out on the crucial details and end up sending you a canned reply, using an email template. I understand why they do this. Every day, they must get hundreds and thousands of inquiries and in order to deal with them in a timely manner, you can’t compose a unique email response to every single question. Especially when the inquiry is a very common one.

However, Streifenhecht had a very specific case with a very specific problem description. No luck. The responses were rather bland and unhelpful. After a few exchanges, he ended up contacting the German Xbox support team. Let me tell you this, the German team is awesome. Via email and over the phone these guys were so helpful, caring and attentive to detail that we won’t bother contacting the US support team, anymore. They took care of the issue regardless of where we lived. They even have an option on their IVR to get English speaking support without redirecting you to the US.

They resolved the issue rather quickly and all is good, now.

In summary, if you are a US citizen and you need help, just call the Germans. And if you think that you can use a proxy to circumvent the region ban, forget about it. Of course you could always try to VPN your way to the title by connecting your Xbox to the PC and going online over Internet Connection Sharing (ICS), but we would never suggest anyone to do this. If the Xbox team is good at anything, then its to uphold their security policies and if you wish to stay a member of Xbox Live and not get banned, then you should just abide by the rules.

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