Peter Moore leaving a leaky ship?

I was surprised to hear that Peter Moore had resigned as senior VP of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business until I started thinking about some issues with the 360 that have been bothering me lately.

For years I have been a devoted supporter of the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online gaming service, on the Xbox forums and to people who, on learning I’m a gamer, ask me about the platform and my experience with it. Xbox Live literally changed my life—not in a religious way, but in a very practical one. Through it I met new friends, some of whom I’ve gotten to know well away from gaming. Three of them are visiting this week to attend the MotoGP race at Laguna Seca, and if not for Xbox Live I’d never have met them.

Microsoft won’t say how many 360s have been sold, but a market research company called NPD keeps track, somehow, and releases sales numbers for consoles and games on a regular basis. So current estimates seem to be around 11 million Xbox 360s sold so far. MS just announced six million Xbox Live members a few months ago, but MS considers those who have the free Silver accounts to be members, even though these accounts don’t allow online multiplayer. Within the community it is well known that many people have multiple accounts, either Silver or Gold—I had two gold accounts last year and used both until my gaming time dropped to the point that I don’t get that much use out of a single account anymore.

The point is that it’s hard to say how many individuals are on Xbox Live using the online multiplayer features, (which is where the 360 experience is truly different from those of Sony and Nintendo, and which is what draws people like me to gaming) but the percentage is lower than MS would like. In spite of the Playstation 3’s high price and flubbed launch (only Sony sees it as other than a disaster, surprise, surprise), the Playstation brand still dominates gaming. The PS2 has sold well over a million consoles and continues to outsell all three ‘Next-Gen’ consoles due to its low price and huge library of games. Video games are for the most part still the domain of the guy who prefers solitary activity to social ones, in spite of MS’s huge efforts to make online gaming the way to go.

Xbox Live is growing all the time, which is good for MS and the 360 because it is Live that differentiates the brand from what Nintendo and Sony currently offer. There are millions and millions of Playstation fans who have yet to switch to the 360, and MS is trying hard to lure them over by securing key games like Grand Theft Auto IV and producing 360 exclusives like Gears of War and the Halo franchise. But it’s really Xbox Live that makes the 360 a different animal in gaming.

One of the key elements to Live’s success is that it lures new customers into the word of video games. I’m not alone among my group of gaming friends when I say that it is Live that makes me a gamer, not the games themselves. Sure, the games need to be appealing, but it is the social aspect of gaming that has kept me at it for the past several years. I don’t sit in a dark room for hours playing by myself as so many gamers do. For me gaming is way to enjoy spending time with friends I’ve made over Xbox Live. If Live were discontinued tomorrow, I would cease being a gamer right then and there.

And finally we get to the leaks in the ship that is Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business and the reasons why I suspect Peter Moore is getting out. All is not well in the land of Xbox.

The first and biggest problem is the appalling failure rate of the 360 console. I am part of a relatively small group of gaming friends, about 20 of us try to play together every Friday night as our schedules and time zones allow and meet daily or nearly so on an online forum to enjoy each other’s company while at work or otherwise away from gaming. Of this small number of 360 owners, we have had an astounding rate of 360 failures. I just did a quick survey and found that among our small group, we have had failed 360s go back to MS for repair or replacement at least twenty-seven times . This counts the poor soul who is currently on his SIXTH 360, having sent units into MS five times for repair or replacement, and another who is on his fifth. Several are on their third or fourth “repaired” or replaced 360s, and the majority have had only one exchange. Others not counted in the twenty-seven are currently nursing their 360s along with the ‘towel-trick,’ a method of wrapping the failing 360 in a towel and turning it on to bake for several hours. In spite of the possible fire hazard, some prefer to risk this because it seems to add some life to the console and it allows one to avoid, at least for the time being, the pathetic turnaround time for 360 repairs. Our current poster boy for MS abuse waited two weeks for MS to ship him the box needed to return his console for repair, and has been without a working 360 since mid-June. This is what I’m hearing from other friends outside our core group about their experiences with MS repairs—2-3 weeks to receive the shipping container, and another 2-3 weeks for the repair itself. And calling MS support to inquire about your 360’s status? Get ready to explore new levels of frustration and suffering.

Two weeks ago Peter Moore talked briefly to Major Nelson about how MS is ‘doing right by its customers’ and extending the 360’s warranty period for the second time in response to all the console problems. This is certainly the right thing to do, but the overall situation still really sucks. It’s too late to have a design that doesn’t fail, but at least we should be able to get them repairs in a timely manner.

I am one of the few people in my circle of friends who has his original 360 console. I have see red ‘trouble’ lights twice in the past, but so far have not had to send my 360 back to MS. I feel VERY lucky that my 360 hasn’t failed, but I’m also angry that so many of my friends’ machines have failed and thus prevented us from enjoying our Friday night game together. It has been ages since everyone had a working 360—almost two years, I guess. There was a short time, right after launch, when they all worked. But ever since the failures started, those of us who make the most of Live’s online multiplayer features have suffered the loss of not being able to play with our friends because of broken 360s. Our Friday night game, which used to be so popular you had to wait to get into a match if you were late, is a shadow of its former self as some of us do other things because we don’t have a working console and those of us who do sit in half empty rooms wishing our missing friends were there.

Another disappointment lately has been a general disillusionment with the responsiveness of the Live team. The xbox.com forums are full of haters and complainers who gripe about this or that without acknowledging how good the service is. Aside from the hardware issues, Xbox Live is fantastic. Overall it is reliable and offers wonderful features for getting together with friends and making new ones online. If it weren’t so compelling, we wouldn’t be quite so angry about the hardware situation.

In the past I have been a constant supporter of Live and the people who make it happen, individuals who work hard and to my perception go largely underappreciated. It is mainly Major Nelson’s podcast interviews with the Live team members that reveal how hard these people work.

Live is not yet perfect, of course. We still can’t invite a friend from the message screen, for example, and every time a friend messages me asking if there’s room in our game and I have to stop playing to cancel his message, go to the Friends List, scroll down to his name, then invite him instead of being able to do that directly from his original message, it rankles as I’ve asked for this exact feature for the past two system updates. The Live team said for the last update that they want to make it as easy as possible to get together with friends, yet they left this feature out again.

In fact the Live team says some other things that sound good but don’t necessarily happen as advertised. MS boasts a strict code of conduct for the forums and use of its Live service. When choosing a gamertag or motto, for example, lots of naughty words are disabled, and rightly so. Even adults who choose not to turn on the parental controls to insulate kids from racy and offensive content appreciate not having to see some idiot’s latest leet spelling of genital parts in his gamertag. There is a robust system of reporting new offenses which are supposed to be addressed in a timely fashion by the Live cops.

Sure, some are going to slip through the cracks from time to time, but how long should it take when a clear offense is reported multiple times?

Example: a few months ago I got a blind friend request from a guy I’d never met. When you achieve any sort of notoriety on a Live scoreboard you start getting these, as well as hate messages and insults, compliments and kudos. I checked the guy’s profile to see what I could learn about him before I accepted the friend request, which I usually do if I have room on my friends list. Most of the people on Live are nice enough, after all.

This individual had listed in his profile motto a URL, which I naively entered in a browser to see why he’d put it there and if it would give some clue about whether I should accept the friend request or not.

The URL was easily one of the most offensive I’ve ever seen, featuring links to porn sites around a main photo of a naked woman, up ended in a bath tub, defecating into the air. Ha ha. I declined the friend request.

I then reported what I considered inappropriate content to MS. No reply, nothing happened. A few weeks later I sent a message one of the team’s more visible members, Trixie360. It took almost two weeks, but the guy heard about it because he replaced the URL with “Code of Conduct” to mock the rules. A few days later he changed it back to the original URL, and I reported it again to Trixie, but it has remained unchanged since June 2.

So anyone who is unlucky enough to get a friend request from this guy, or who happens to see his name on a leader board and check his profile, might innocently see this appalling content, brought to us via Xbox Live. Either it’s more offensive to me than it is to Trixie, or she’s too busy to do anything about it. Either way it’s a big problem that this URL remains part of someone’s public motto.

And sadly it’s not the first time I’ve had a problem with responsiveness from the Live team. I know they work very hard and can’t get to every complaint the same day. I know they can’t add every Live feature people request. But when it comes to making the Live experience a safe one, they need to do better. Another neighbor, this one 12 years old, just got a 360 Elite for his birthday, and sadly I recommending to his parents that they not grant his desire for a Live account. The depravity of the evil Live members still trumps Microsoft’s efforts to make Xbox Live a safe place.

With the above comments in mind, you can see why I’m unhappy with how Live is treating me and my friends. As much as I like the service and appreciate the efforts of those who make it happen, there is just so much going wrong these days that it’s very depressing. It seems to me only a matter of time before a class action suit is filed on behalf of those who have lost weeks of gaming due to multiple console returns. And how long before someone sues Microsoft for failing to enforce its own code of conduct?

Perhaps Peter Moore knows something we don’t, and is heading to EA before the poop really hits the fan.