Undertow Free for Five Days
by Deejay Knight: at January 20th, 2008, 3:27 am
Have you talked to any Xbox Live gamers lately about the outage that happened over the holidays? If you have I’m sure you heard many mumbles, grumbles, and possibly even bloodcurdling screams of rage. That’s what happens when a service never known to have been brought down falls under the weight of too many new users at once.
The service is back to decent levels now, but with the official Xbox Live forums fuming and a lawsuit being dropped on Microsoft, gamers were obviously less than enthused about the outage.
Lucky for us XBL gamers, we’ll be getting a free game out of the deal. Marc Whitten updated gamers on Xbox.com recently:
We’re pleased to announce that from 2:00 a.m. PST Wednesday, January 23, 2008 through 11:59 p.m. PST, Sunday, January 27, 2008 you can download the full version of the recent Xbox LIVE Arcade game, UndertowUndertow reviews
free of charge.
A lot of gamers will likely fume about not getting the XBLA title of their choosing, but Undertow seems like a pretty good game to get for free.
There’s no way I’m going to pass this one up, so consider this your notice. Download Undertow some time between Wednesday and Sunday. I will be.
What do you think? Is Undertow a good enough Xbox Live Arcade title to justify the outage? If not, which game do you think would be a better choice?
I already have Undertow but haven’t played it yet. I’ve heard good things about it though.
they should just give us 800 points and let us spend it whichever way we like.
I can see your point, reef! It would definitely be a bonus to see 800 points to spend on whatever Arcade title I wanted!
Microsoft isn’t stupid though, they’re minimizing their losses. They’re trying to appear generous (and they are to an extent) by giving out a free game as an apology. The factors that help minimize their losses, however, are: 1) Not everyone will know, so not everyone will get it. 2) Those who already own it are the biggest base of people who would want it, but already paid. 3) A small number of people with 0 interest in the game won’t get it. 4) Related to #3, 800 points would be better, but that means giving everyone 800 points, which breaks #1 and #2 as well.
So, props to Microsoft for giving out a free game for a few days. And anti-props for being greedy Microsoft.
Awesome post as always, Mike.