Like many people I know, I’m a long time customer of Microsoft which is one of the biggest and richest companies on the planet.

I’m also a happy XBOX gamer and Live subscriber. Well, most of the time.

This holiday I received an XBOX Live points / cash card (or whatever they call it now) and decided to buy two small games that were on sale for the holidays.

The first was for Xbox One, and everything went smoothly.

However when I purchased the second game for my 360, it totally ignored my gift card and used my credit card instead.

Let me just say UGH! Really, I would rather not have the game, then have paid for it using my credit card versus my gift card balance.

And I just don’t understand how a multi-billion dollar company allows such sub-standard software to process orders in the 21st century?

But wait, there’s more…

So being a little pissed off, I removed the payment option from my Xbox account so my future purchases would be forced to go against my existing gift card balance, now sitting there lonely and unused.

Then when the free games with gold games came out for January, I figure it would be a good idea to start getting the 360 games as well as the Xbox One games since the 360 games are all backwards compatible (BC) now.

And to avoid having to juggle two consoles (and the fact you can’t buy BC games in the Xbox One store) I fired up the Xbox One browser and attempted to get my free Xbox 360 “game with gold” from Xbox.com.

Except, this is where it fell apart again.

XBOX.com Would not let me get my FREE game because I don’t have a payment option on my account anymore.

REALLY? FOR A FREE GAME THAT COMES WITH MY PAID SUBSCRIPTION?

Ugh.

Sigh.

Hey, Microsoft and XBOX execs… could you please take a break from rolling around in your billions of cash reserves and  hire someone with basic skills to fix your broken webstore?!?!

I mean really, if your website is so bad that it is going to ignore my existing balance and change my credit card when I make a purchase, AND also thinks I need a credit card on file to download a FREE GAME that come with my already paid for subscription, then your webstore is obviously BROKEN.

Sincerely,

Grey

PS – I did finally get my free game. I had to fire up my old XBOX 360, go through the steps of buying the game for $0, then cancel the game download since if I play it, it’ll be on the Xbox One using BC.