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Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

February 20, 2012 – 12:39 pm | 3 Comments

Tiny Diggers has just been released on the iPad and soon the Mac computer. Here’s the details on this fun, educational game from TouchTilt Games.
Tiny Diggers Delivers Learning With Construction Trucks For Kids on the …

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Home » XBOX 360

Your 360 Half-Owns Your Downloads

Submitted by on January 6, 2007 – 8:16 am4 Comments

xbox360smashed_200701.jpgA rant over at BusyGamers touches on an interesting problem with Xbox Live Marketplace downloads that I also heard mentioned on the GamersWithJobs podcast this week: your Xbox 360 half-owns your downloadable content.

It turns out that when you buy something on XBLM — as I’ll affectionately call the Marketplace — your Gamertag gets half ownership and your physical console gets the other half. This allows you and any other Gamertag (account) on your home Xbox 360 to use the content. Buy Geometry Wars for yourself and your spouse can play it too. After all, if you bought a game disc at the store and brought it home for your 360, you and your spouse would both be able to play it, right? So that’s fair. But if your 360 breaks and you get a replacement, the rules change.


The problem occurs when your 360 dies a horrible death, as lots and lots of them have done over the past year. When your replacement arrives (thanks to Microsoft’s warranty, recently extended to a full year), you log in and you can play the content you downloaded, which is nice. But nobody else on your 360 can play that content. Microsoft hasn’t yet figured out how to reassign the content licenses from your old, dead 360 to a new one.

There are kludgy workarounds, which typically involve Microsoft giving credits equaling the purchase price of the content to ANOTHER Gamertag on your 360, thereby allowing that Gamertag to purchase the content again, enabling it on the 360 for all.

When this came up on the GamersWithJobs podcast, one of the participants felt this really wasn’t much of a problem because he thought that the vast majority of gamers are the sole users of their 360 and that the number of people this would happen to would be far too small for Microsoft to change how their licensing system works. I definitely see his point. The number is probably small, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, especially with the failure rates of consoles today.

What about you? Do you share your 360 with anyone else? I know James does, and that his spouse losing access to UNO might cause something of a dust-up until it got resolved. Do you think Microsoft should change the system or just continue using band-aid workarounds?

  • Subnet6

    “Do you think Microsoft should change the system or just continue using band-aid workarounds?”

    The only reason this problem exists is due to the high failure rate of the 360. Sure, most are fine, but clearly there are enough failing to make this problem pretty obvious. I would say, they should start by make the console more durable (which it appears they have tried to do). Then they should figure a way to allow you to get your content. Anyone know how Sony and Nintendo are handling this situation?

  • qbix

    I’ve ran into this and I was never able to get an agent or even a supervisor to understand how to fix my problem. I explained it to them but they refused to give me the MS points I needed to re-purchase marketplace content I owned (with a different account of course). It really pissed me off.

    I must note that the issue is not only multiple accounts being prohibited from playing your arcade titles but also being unable to play them offline. I only have one gamertag on my machine and sometimes I take it to a friend’s house to play. Before they sent me back a new 360, I was able to play any arcade titles offline, but now I only get to play the fucking demo version of every arcade game for which I paid full price! What about those days Live has to go down for maintenance? I don’t think it’s fair to deprive me of playing my arcade titles which happen to make up more than half of my entire library of 360 games!! What the fuck!

    MS really needs to fix this because it’s just not right. At the very least, they should inform every single one of their agents of this issue so nobody has to listen to ignorant and stubborn support people who don’t even have the authority of fixing your problems. Ok, I’m mad now.

  • NicS

    Doesn’t this apply only when you have to send your HDD with your Xbox 360? And from what I understand this doesn’t happen that often.

  • qbix

    No, it applies whether or not you send your HD in. Prior to sending my 360 back I called to corroborate that they only needed the console. And that’s the issues here. If they end up replacing the entire console instead of fixing whatever was wrong with it, the unique hardware ID goes with it. The HD is a removable piece which means you could re-download the games to 10 different hard drives if you wanted and they would all work just fine as long as you were plugging them to the console you used to purchase the games.

    What MS did almost makes sense because it really does prevent people from buying just one copy and spreading it across many 360s. However, MS should’ve made it so that the hardware ID license was transferable to a new machine and perhaps only allow a maximum of 3-5 license transfers. I’m just rambling here and there are many ways MS could’ve prevented this but for now we have to settle for their stupid workaround and cross our fingers when we call support as not to end up talking to an agent who doesn’t have a clue about this issue.