Xbox Live Account Ban Will Result In Losing Access To All Your Xbox One Games

Edit: Xbox Live’s Major Nelson has answered the question “if someone is banned their fault or not will they lose access to the games they purchased?” by responding “absolutely not you will always have access to the games you have purchased” but he did suggest the ban could still apply to multiplayer. This essentially crushes what Xbox Live’s official support team stated on Twitter in the article below. Details of Major Nelson’s response can be seen here. Thanks to Kyuu for the tip-off in the comments below.

It seems like things have gone from bad to worse for Microsoft. Some of the criticisms it has faced in the past weeks include:

(We have written articles about most of these big issues with the Xbox One although we haven’t been able to cover them all, you can see the articles we have written below as they have hyperlinks)

• Concerns over region locking
• Inferior hardware specifications to the PlayStation 4
• Issues over activation fees for used games
• Issues over lending used games
• Privacy concerns over the always listening Kinect device but it can be turned off
• Being more expensive than the PS4
• Requiring an internet connection every day
• Their E3 demos weren’t actually run on the console but on a Windows 7 PC

There are probably more criticisms that we missed but as you can see Microsoft’s Xbox One has had a really hard time of late. This shows no signs of letting up as now it is revealed an Xbox Live Account ban means losing all access to your Xbox One games according to Xbox’s Support Team on Twitter. Again this is causing outrage because people are worried about if there account is hacked or banned for an unfair reason. In essence the PlayStation 4 won’t have this problem because games are all physical, not digital, and are not tied to your account. While this is “no different” to current digital Xbox 360 games it is still likely to outrage people more. At least with Xbox 360 you have the option to buy physical copies and avoid this “risk” of losing your digital content with account bans.

What Microsoft are doing with this is nothing out of the ordinary, in fact as far as I am aware the same principle is used by Steam. However, the fact there is no option to get around this (because all games have to be digitally registered to your account) means a lot of people could be put off.

Image courtesy of Microsoft