Microsoft to make switching regions on Xbox Live accounts easier

Switching regions on an Xbox Live account has been a pain, especially in India, where the Xbox 360 debuted without Live and players were forced to make accounts with the region set to the US. Well, it now seems Microsoft is finally testing a new way for users to change the regions of their accounts.

According to NeoWin, players will be allowed to change their region once every three months, and the gamer tag, Achievements, Microsoft Points and Xbox Live Gold subscriptions will all be included in the transfer. However, Microsoft warns that some items that are region-locked may not be transferred. Examples of this include TV services and Xbox Music passes.

Switching regions will be a lot easier

Back in December, the online feature of Xbox wasn't stable, which caused a lot of problems for online streaming services such as Netflix, HBO Go and Hulu Plus. More importantly, it was the lack of access to saved games in the cloud that affected users. Members affected by this outage would receive an error, reading 0x807b0198.

All these issues we fixed though, and in order to compensate for the disruption in service, Microsoft offered an additional month of Xbox Live for free. The Cloud Saved Games feature soon came back online and all issues pertaining to the outage have been resolved.

Xbox Live has been a very popular online service that continues to grow every year, with new features and services being added on a timely basis. Last year, Microsoft announced that it was rolling out updates to add more than 40 new apps to its Xbox Live service, such as MTV, The CW Network and CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada. While some of the apps will be free to use, many would require additional subscription even if the users have a Gold subscription to Xbox Live. It’s estimated that users in the US on an average spend 84 hours a month on Xbox Live, which is a lot and might be the reason why Microsoft is expanding the service even further.

Microsoft spokesperson Larry Hryb had a little message on his blog to all those affected: “We want to thank all of our Xbox LIVE members impacted by the Cloud Saved Games service issue for your patience and understanding. It took longer than we expected to get back to full performance as we needed to ensure the integrity of everyone’s game saves. Whether you couldn’t access your game saves for a couple of hours or a couple of days, we sincerely apologise for the delay and inconvenience. We will be automatically applying a one-month extension to the Xbox LIVE Gold memberships of everyone who was impacted. We can assure you we’ll also be doing a thorough post mortem to help prevent this from happening again.”