Circuit City Ripping Off Xbox 360 Customers
Kotaku's got the drop on another sleazy Circuit City in-store service. For $28.99, Circuit City will upgrade your Xbox360 so it's backwards compatible with Xbox games. The problem is this already occurs if your Xbox360 is set up for Xbox Live. If you don't have it connected to a phone line, Windows will also send you a patch disc for free.
Hm, first they were going to rip your DVDs to iPod, violating copyright law, and now this (which will undoubtedly be smacked down by corporate as "unauthorized."). It seems that maybe Circuit City has some sort of company culture that encourages this behavior?
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While I agree this is an outright ripoff it could be usefull for people who have no internet connection at all. Of course id Imagine anyone who owns a 360 owns a PC with a cd burner and has an ISP so they could update via xbox.com anyways but you never know...
Either way the price is incredibly high. It takes 3 seconds to download the update from Xbox.com and what does a CD-R cost these days, cant be more then 10 cents. So what they are saying is their time is worth $5 a second.
Now if I could just get them to somehow program my computer to install automatic updates for Windows XP . . .
If there's a level below regular "unethical" it must be "petty and nonsensically unethical."
Very Shady of Circuit City...What if the customer has only a few Backwards Compatible games, they still charge the full $28.99 price?
Considering Microsoft is still updating its BC list, are they going to charge customers $28 every time the list updates? OUTRAGEOUS
This reminds me of the Geek Squad Story. "You want to play your old Xbox games on your new 360? Sure no problem! Oh looks like you'll need the malware removed too and all a new virus checker installed too..."
Unrealistic goals for high margin services coupled with people who are interested in keeping their families fed yield this sort of crap. Gotta love the big consumer electronics retailers.
Can't believe they charge $28 for this. Must be a massive profit margin considering all the BC patches are free.
"You want to play your old xbox games on your 360? Sure we can do that, it'll be $28. Oh, looks like you've got malware and viruses too we'll take care of that for an additional fee"
thanks dox! I didn't know you could do that, and i've been waiting till i can afford the $79 network adapter for my 360 to get a live account and patch the thing! I'm playing Forza on my 52" DLP tonight baby!
I'm not sure it is really them being sleezy, per say. It's probably something as simple as a bunch of underinformed people making the decision to provide a service that they've been asked for.
Both 'rogue services' that have been ID'ed here are probably cases of some low level management type who is making a call on a service they're asked for without a complete understanding of the ramifications of what they are offering.
I'd have a hard time calling it 'sleezy' if it's just a case of incompetence. Incompetence isn't 'sleezy'--- it's just incompetence.
I suspect that the 'corporate culture' that is creating these 'deals' is more a case of lowballing wages, resulting in a lower quality of employees.
this just goes to prove:
never trust anything set in comic sans.
DeeJay, Forza looks really nice in High Def but there are some frame rate problems that werent there on Xbox. Still though its nice to play in HD with no jaggies and the wireless controller. Forza 2 isnt far off, maybe I'll see you on Live.
Sure it's deceiving, underhanded and somewhate predatory, but you have to love the rogue nature of it all. Very sassy and enterprising on the part of whatever renegade CC stores are doing this. Unless, of course, this is clandestinely coming from corporate; in which case, it's just teh suck.