The first impression of a blackout is that of panic. But, sometimes you get rewarded as well, the fault though has to be that of the service providers. Yes, Microsoft has gone to the verge of doing exactly that.
Xbox Live Gold members were recently provided with a month’s free extension in the subscription. This was the decision taken, by XBL general manager Alex Garden, when there was a snag in the Cloud Saved Games feature for about two days.
The feature allows the members to store saved games, using Cloud technology, on Xbox Live servers so that they don’t lose out on a game even while playing on a different console. It is an isolated feature and has no connection with the other services. This enables online storage of the games instead of on the HDD. Additional features enables you to download the saved game and use them on your Xbox console, as long as you have enough storage space on your HDD.
A technical snag was detected in the Saved Games feature only, whereas the other cloud services continued to function normally. During the tenure of the outage, users made unlimited unsuccessful attempts to access the feature, but faced a cryptic error code: 0x807b0198. There was a mixed bag of irregularities on the part of this feature. Some Xbox Live users couldn’t access the entire services, whereas the others had issues over certain Apps. The fault though did not affect many, but as it lasted for about two days, the company decided to reward their valued customers.
The customers affected, will have their accounts updated automatically, so they don’t have to file a claim or contact support, related to the matter. Alex Garden, went to the extent of providing assurance to every user that nothing of such sort would happen in the future and that all the necessary steps would be taken. This disruption in the services has been the longest in the history of Xbox Live, since its interception.
All’s well that ends well. For about two years there has been a rumour of Xbox 720 that could see the daylight by the end of 2013. Configurations of a 8GB system memory, a Blu-ray drive, Kinect 2.0 support, four core with eight logical threads are all expected in the gaming console, as revealed by Xbox World.
Baffled by the news of the blackout, I logged into my account and found that news was found to be true. Was having problems retrieving as well saving games on the cloud feature. Thanks to Microsoft and XBL think-heads to find a co-operative solution to the problem.