thoughthead

For those of you who don’t know, not too long ago Microsoft announced that a new contest was going to pop up where you’d be challenged to complete some in game tasks for prizes. The Xbox Live Rewards program is sponsored by Old Spice and the first of many “challenges” instructs gamers to achieve 1,500 points in 3 months time.

This turned into a debacle on so many levels it’s not even funny. The announcement stated that registration would open on February 12th and gamers would have until April 12th to complete the challenge. Prizes are limited (and some of them are good prizes too, including full retail games).

This was their first mistake. Earning 1500 points is a fairly simple task. In-fact I was able to legitimately earn 1610 points in just a few hours time. Then of course there are the more dubious types like gamesavers and those who would earn the points in the weeks leading up to the challenge while off-line then log in after registration and “earn” them all at once, not unlike pinching a garden hose and waiting for the presure to built up before releasing. The idea that you have three months to complete this challenge is a farce, this is a battle where I’d be genuinely surprised if the prizes last more then a week, most likely they’ll only last a few days. Unfortunately for me it only registered 500 or so of my 1610 points, so I’ll be earning closer to 2500 point before I get any prizes, that is if I get any at all.

It’s obvious that the challenge presented, the number of prizes available and the comically long period of time given to complete the challenge exemplifies supreme lack of insight into the demand for this sort of thing. I don’t understand WHY, considering Microsoft themselves were recently bragging about how overwhelming the support for Achievements has been. The lack of foresight didn’t stop there.

The registration page didn’t arrive until late in the day 8:00pm EST to be specific. Leaving gamers sitting idle in forums all day not playing games while they waited for the site to go live. When the registration site did finally go up it crashed almost instantly. This wasn’t at all surprising to me, but apparently it caught Microsoft off guard. This is rather ridiculous actually when you think about it. The Rewards site is hosted on separate servers from the main Xbox website. However the only link to the rewards site was listed on the press release page, and before the site went up the rewards link would redirect to the press release page. You would think that if 1000s of gamers were pinging the press release page and the rewards page didn’t go live until late in the day they would have plenty of time to see the kind of traffic that would be offloaded to the rewards servers as soon as it went live. This isn’t some freelance web development firm, this is the largest software company on the planet they pretty much had 16 hours worth of real traffic to the page on xbox.com that they could have used to analyze the demand and reacted before it became a problem; it’s obvious that they didn’t.

This isn’t anything new though, anyone who purchased the system when it launched should remember that downloading anything on the marketplace or vising the Xbox.com website the in the first week was worth nothing but hours of frustration from slow or broken downloads and error pages. Then again when they launched the video marketplace the servers crashed almost instantly because they didn’t anticipate demand. Then again when the Verizon points giveaway happened, the servers crashed because they didn’t anticipate demand, then when they had the special promotion with Amazon.com the servers crashed because they didn’t anticipate demand, Then again with the Halo 3 beta sign ups. The rewards program marks at least the sixth time they’ve failed to anticipate the demands of their customers. Here’s some free advice: take whatever you anticipate the demand to be a double it, then assume that the newly doubled population is at least five times as rabid and adamant about signing up the instant the service becomes available. At very least use your own history and other cues to better forecast the demand. I don’t know about anyone else but I would think that doubling or tripling the server capacity and not needing it would be much better then not having enough. If you setup a bunch of extra servers and they aren’t needed, great, the customers are satisfied and you can pull those servers down and designate them to your next project. If demand actually fills them, great, it’s a good thing you put them there because demand is still filled and customers are still happy, if you don’t set them up and demand goes higher then you thought, then you have 1000s of angry and frustrated customers on your hands. Paying the system admin’s overtime to fix the problem in short order plus the added stress on consumer support outlets probably winds up being far far greater then just setting up some extra equipment from the start in case you need it.

Beyond lack of foresight there is another issue with this. The rewards program is US only. Though I live in the US I still consider this to be a problem. Xbox Live is a GLOBAL network, if you don’t do things globally you start segregating and pissing off large portions of your market. Again, this isn’t anything new, the US was also the only country blessed with the Video Marketplace. On one hand I’m excited to have a US based console maker that delivers the goods to the US first. having been a gamer since the 8bit days I have some not so fond memories of seeing countless cool stuff hit Japan months before anywhere else and often not even leave the country, heck even the Xbox 1 had limited edition consoles and some cool games that never came state-side. With that in mind I understand exactly why the rest of the world is pissed about this. In most cases I think they’d normally just be upset but optimistic that they might get it too but Microsoft has change this hopeful anticipation into consumer demand when they launched their console world wide simultaneously. Doing this they recognized the world as a singular community, this raised the bar and that’s the kind of service the world as a whole expects to receive.

This brings the problems full circle to the underlying problems here, beyond meeting consumer demand forecasting server loads and delivering consistent service: COMMUNICATION. I think Europe, Japan, Australia and other parts of the globe wouldn’t mind waiting a bit for these services if they at very least had a guarantee that they would be getting the service and and a solid date when they’ll be getting it. It’s not as good as everyone launching within a few days of each other but knowing upfront when you’ll get your goods makes that pill a whole lot easer to swallow. It also reminds your consumers that they aren’t forgotten, they just aren’t first. It wouldn’t be so bad to give other regions new services first once in a while either. I can understand that many of these things have to be released a region at a time, but there’s no good reason why Europe or Australia, or any other region can’t come first once in a while. Even still we’ve been told, in reactionary discussion responding to consumer backlash, that the Video Marketplace would eventually come to Europe, but there’s no definite timeline, and there’s no guarantee it will show up anywhere else. As for this rewards program we have no idea if it will ever hit other regions, I hope it does, Xbox Live has made me many friends all over the globe and I don’t appreciate it very much when they’re excluded from such things.

As for the rewards program right now, the page is down with a simple error message that says to try again later; more break down in communication. People are wondering if their registrations went through, if they’ve missed their chance to compete, if the page will be up in minutes, hours, days, weeks. The only worthwhile response came from MajorNelson’s blog. He seems to be the absolute best source of communication coming out of the Xbox team in Redmond, which is a shame because it’s only of his personal doing, all of the major console manufacturers needs a person dedicated to making sure that consumers are informed, and when something goes awry they know what’s going on, they know what to expect, and they receive these responses with such quickness that they don’t have time to ask the questions before they’re presented with the answer (I wont even get into the misinformation being spewed by their customer service reps). That’s not all of it either, communication is a two way street, for as much as they need to respond to consumer inquiries listening to consumer demand is just as much a part of communication, and we’ve already discussed how much that is lacking.

Microsoft should consider themselves lucky though, for a whole year they took the brunt of consumer and industry abuse where every last one of their follies was scrutinized and well publicized, they haven’t seemed to get much better but at least now their mistakes pale in comparison to those of their biggest competitor. They have a chance to shine in the face of their competition’s mistakes yet rather then taking this golden opportunity to clean up their act they continue to make the same mistakes and continue to just barely squeak by.