Why China’s Xbox users are furious that their service is still free

On Wednesday, Microsoft China’s official Xbox One Weibo account announced that its Xbox Live online service – which costs money everywhere else – would remain free in China.

How did China’s Xbox fans respond? Fury, rage, and a lot of curse words.

China’s Xbox One is not like yours

To understand why, we need to wind the clock back to the Xbox One’s original launch in China. The Xbox One that came to China was incredibly restricted compared to what other countries’ gamers got. It was totally region-locked, offered very few games, and it came with a totally separate online and offline system that segregated Chinese users from the global Xbox One community and denied them access to a lot of the services offered elsewhere.

The restrictions are the result of Chinese government policy – for example, online games need to be approved by China’s Ministry of Culture before they can be released in China, so lots of the online games that Xbox One’s online service provides in other countries couldn’t be legally offered. Recognizing that this made its subscription-based Xbox Live service much less attractive to Chinese users, Microsoft compromised in China by offering a much more restricted version of the service in “beta” for free. If China’s gamers couldn’t access the real Xbox Live, at least they wouldn’t be made to pay for a neutered version.

The bait-and-switch

The problem, however, came this February when Microsoft got people’s hopes up. The company announced that on Thursday, March 17, the free “beta” would be coming to an end, and Xbox Live would cost money even for Chinese users. Starting from then, Microsoft said, a year’s Live subscription would cost nearly US$60, but the trade-off was that China’s segregated Xbox Live would finally be integrated with the rest of the world, meaning that China’s gamers would have access to game servers across the globe and at least some of the added-value services Xbox Live provides to the rest of its global client base.

Then, predictably, those hopes were dashed at the last second. Just one day before many Xbox users expected they would finally have access to the same Xbox Live service the rest of the world enjoys, Xbox announced via its official Weibo account that nothing was happening. No end to the free beta, and no global integration (at least for now). The reason for the change, Microsoft said, was “to improve the Gold member experience” and “for reasons you understand.” It even put up a cheeky Weibo poll asking fans to vote on jokey reasons why the expected change was no longer happening.

Now it looks like even hardcore fans may be getting sick of the run-around.

To say that Chinese Xbox fans were not amused might be an understatement. Fans are incensed at what many see as a pattern of constant delays (it may be worth pointing out that the Xbox One’s launch in China saw a last-second delay, too), but they’re also pissed at the unapologetic tone of the official Weibo post that made the announcement. The Weibo comment section is full of curses like “f*** your mother, Microsoft” and people asking to return their consoles.

And the console’s followers don’t appear to be backing down, either. Many of the comments on subsequent, unrelated promotional posts put up on the Xbox Weibo have also been complaints about Microsoft’s treatment of domestic gamers.

Sales of game consoles such as the Xbox One have been slow in China more or less since the end of the console ban in 2014 led to Sony and Microsoft officially launching consoles in the country. The reasons for that are numerous – consoles are expensive, not well suited to handle China’s favorite kinds of games, etc. – but one major factor is definitely that due to China’s restrictive censorship measures, domestic consoles simply cannot offer the same kinds of services that consoles elsewhere can.

Only the most hardcore console gaming fans seem to have picked up official domestic versions of the consoles, and now it looks like even they might be getting sick of getting the run-around, and starting to believe that their second-class user experience is an intended feature rather than a temporary bug.