And this is why I HATE stupid contests like this, it's virtually impossible to get the corps to play fair. Even when free stuff is involved, the consumer still gets screwed.

@dragonfire81: Not exactly true. My boyfriend got an extra 25 songs (He drinks a soda/day. I judge him for it.) within the last couple weeks. This sounds more like a glitch to me than them "not playing fair." Why would they give away so many songs and then just magically stop?

@Ananelle: It did happen to me - I tried to cash in about a dozen points (usually I would expect anywhere from 9-12 free songs from that) last week and didn't win a single song from them. I was shocked that this happened and suspected something was up, but didn't look into it.

I'd say they were playing MORE than fair when the contest started. 21 out of 22 of my caps were winners during the first month of the thing (1/3 of the contest's length I think), and some people had 50 cap win streaks going on. If you wanted to buy Rock Band songs, it was actually cheaper to buy Pepsi, pour the stuff down the drain, and save money on the song.

I'm not saying what happened here is wrong (it does look like it ended early), I'm just saying that if you didn't wait until the last day you not only didn't get screwed, but you probably made out like a bandit.

I got around 150 songs from the promo over the summer. I do agree at the end, it was tough... but I chalk it up to people suddenly trying to cash in caps.

It was sweet in June, before the caps had any real market penetration, I lucked out and had them on day 1. Nearly every cap for everyone was a winner at that point.

@Denise Voskuil-Marre: Make that "last week Saturday".

maaaaaaaan.

I LOVE Rock Band and didn't hear about this promotion AT ALL!
And now I'm screwed out of it...

Might be becuase I don't drink Soda.

Oh well. sucks ta be me, i guess.

I like how you jump on this story and ignore gamestop screwing thousands of people out of free beatles songs. Especially since I sent in a tip on it.

I definitely had a handful of codes leftover that I wanted to use for songs, but towards the end (the last 2 weeks) I got WAY more losses than wins. I'm bummed that I lost a half-dozen codes or so by the early wrap of the contest.

More free songs, please. :\

@logicalnoise: How are they screwing people out of free songs? I hadn't heard about that and I picked up my reserved copy day 1.

I liked the promotion last year where every 5 codes you collected was 1 free mp3 off amazon.com, no chance element about it. I got a lot of singles that way.

The site never stated that EVERY cap was a guaranteed win so this part is perfectly acceptable, there were supposed to be some losers in there.

I participated in this however I knew better not to buy pepsi just to get the caps. The problem is that the site was down for the majority of the contest giving out error messages to those who got instant wins. If you wanted to redeem your instant wins for the the Wii points code you were screwed for about a month till they FINALLY fixed the error and you were able to get your points. You could get your instant wins but not your points, very frustrating. But the points came in for like a whole day or 2 maybe before the end of the promotion before the whole "stealing points" thing started. So if you didn't redeem then you were screwed.

I think its a little bit ridiculous for them to cause us all to wait a whole month for our points, especially for the people who bought tons of Pepsi just because of this promotion. Then make the points come in just before the end of the promotion then a couple days later the website starts stealing all the codes that were still being entered.

The promotion was also supposed to end Sept. 30th but they pulled it early.

Dear Pepsi, if you can't run a promotion right and be prepared for the demand from it, don't start a promo in the first place!

@logicalnoise: I'd like to see this covered as well, because I have one of my preorder pieces but haven't registered yet purely because of the confusion and would rather not render my code useless.

@JB4GDI: 50 nothing, I went over 100 before my first miss.

@Outrun1986: The Wii points came and went multiple times. I can't speak for the beginning, but I got probably around 2400 Wii points toward the middle.

@Denise Voskuil-Marre: I think the issue with this promotion is that it slowly became available to everyone, resulting in progressively more people playing as the weeks rolled on and word got out how easy it was to win. When I began participating, I was winning with a frequency of about 95%, to the point that I snagged a total of 53 songs. But by mid-August, when I decided the promotion was no longer worth putting aside my disdain for Pepsi (I cannot stand the taste), I doubt if I got a song 10% of the time. They were giving away 5,000 songs a day, that means either the number of people entering had increased to the point that most of the songs had been given out by the time I entered them that day or Pepsi tweaked their system to reward winners less often and spread the songs out. I would love to go with the former and assume that Pepsi did nothing wrong but something tells me Pepsi over-tweaked things and it came to a head at the end with no one winning anything and they don't want to admit to that.

These companies always reserve the right to end the ~contest~ or promotion early and without notice. It looks like they had enough promotion and ran out the project's budget early.

I personally benefited from the original and first Pepsi points deal (circa 1997-1998) by getting a couple of small things like a cd holder and key chains. Never went back to playing after trying the first online Pepsi points promo by entering several caps and getting zilch...

Best ended-early promo I received was one for baby diapers when my (now ex-) spouse and I had our first child. While now forgetting which diaper company was responsible, the gist was you collected diaper box upc's and could get small children's toys on up to a stroller in redemption "prizes". The company called "Uncle" when they ran out of all the promo prizes but sent letters to the submitters that offered between a $25 and $125 dollar check depending on your upc claiming level. We got the sweet $125 check as we had submitted enoough upc's for one of the higher promo prizes.

@jezebelseven: @logicalnoise:

Wow, I haven't heard about this at all. I'd like to see a story just to know what's going on.

It sounds like their "random" wasn't really random. They would have had X number of winners out of however many bottlecaps. Somehow they hit X well before they ran out of bottlecaps so the remaining caps are all losers. But if you read the rules of the contest, it should tell you how many there were and what the overall odds of winning were supposed to be.

This contest was not in my area, but that wouldn't have mattered. Even with the odds being 21 in 22 that you would win something, I would always get the "Please Play Again" cap.

@logicalnoise:

Yea I missed this too. I got an email stating that codes would be sent in late Oct when the DLC was released.

@jezebelseven: And I just tried to sign up on a whim... and shockingly, my code supposedly has 'already been used'. Not cool.

And I'm supposed to call a long distance number to (maybe?) fix it? Cute, EA.

From my research online I don't even know if calling them will get it taken care of, in regards to the DLC. Or if it will just get me access to the 'behind the scenes' stuff.

@Outrun1986: Pepsi didn't learn from their Harrier mistake? Whatever happened to that lawsuit, anyway?

@MitchEvious:Here's teh full email I sent into teh tipline:
This past Wednesday The Beatles: Rock Band came out for all major systems. MTV and Gamestop had worked together on all kinds of promotions including some promotions to encourage pre-orders. One deal offered exclusive access to a "pre-order" club which provided exclusive videos and content. The other promised 3 free downloads of The Beatles: Rock Band Download content once it was released(a 6 dollar value).

On Wednesday when I picked up my pre-order I had forgotten about the promotion. But later I saw this thread on the official rock band boards which reminded me. According to that thread many Gamestops either didn't mention the promotion or lied and said, "The codes are inside the gamecase".

When I went back today, I explained how I was never offered the code. The clerk didn't say anything he just opened a drawer and handed me a card. He started walking away. I quickly noticed that it was a card for access to the pre-order club. "Uh, no this is for the pre-order club I already got one of these a while back. I need a code to get the 3 free downloadable tracks." I noticed him roll his eyes and he went back to the drawer searched of a second and found a shrink-wrapped package of different looking cards. Of course it was the right pack and I got my card. What's sad is evidently I was the first person to even get a card from that Gamestop and it's a whole two days past the game launch meaning most people probably already picked up their orders. Considering Gamestop claims to have had over 500,000 preorders of the Beatles rock band a whole lot of people got shafted.

@logicalnoise: here's the thread I was referring to. [www.rockband.com]

@jezebelseven: luckily the code I had worked but again Gamestop is either incompetent or purposefully negligent on this promo.

@logicalnoise: A guy I know has vowed to no longer preorder anything from Gamestop after being shafted on THREE preorder codes this year alone. All of them had issues, he called Gamestop and they were aware of the issues and he eventually got it fixed, but nevertheless he's done wasting his time on preorder bonuses that always get FUBAR'd.

@econobiker:

Maybe so, but if they end a promotion before it specifically says it on the bottle, how is someone supposed to know? It makes it fall more under false advertising as it might get someone to buy it who was hesitant at the time.

Do any of these contests ever go as planned?

funny thing. when i found out about the contest last month, i'm not a real soda drinker, so i just went through the recycle bin at work. found 2 'winners'. glad i redeemed them on the spot :p

@dragonfire81: Seriously. I've only had one Gamestop that was able to fulfill 90% of my preorder bonuses, but after that one screw up I decided to buy Gamestop stuff exclusively online. For some reason it seems like there's no way the stores can honor every pre-order bonus.

Plus, if you buy online and the pre-order bonuses run out (which has only happened to me once for a Metroid poster), they'll give you a coupon that more than makes up for it.

I now advise against pre-ordering anything from their store. Just use their site.

@logicalnoise: My Gamestop was great, actually. The only problem arose when they forgot to give me the card with the download code on it; I called when I realized what happened, they grabbed an extra one of the cards, put my name on it and set it aside for me to pick up later. Showed up at the store, got the card, no problems at all. I wish they'd remembered to give me the card in the first place, but then, I didn't remember to ask about it, either, and I was there pretty much first thing in the morning.

I plugged the code in on the website the other day and again had no discernable issues. The code was accepted, I picked my songs and got the confirmation e-mail. The songs I chose aren't going to be released until next month, so I can't say for sure that everything will go swimmingly, but so far, so good.

@dragonfire81: They plan on people not bothering with some of their promotions too. Personally I hate the recent (within the past 5-10 years) "enter code" to win BS. You only need to sign up with your email address, home address, mothers maiden name, and phone number so we can sell your information to marketing firms.

I just want the simple "You Win" bottle cap to show up again.

@cash_da_pibble: I love rock band and buy every song, and I didn't take advantage of this promotion. I also don't drink soda, but it'd be worth it if you were getting $2 songs for $1.50.

@schernoff:

IOW, a hacker managed to figure out how to generate codes and auto-submit them.

Does this come as a surprise? How many of these online contests are gamed just like this?

@logicalnoise: From what you said there were two codes-- one for the preorder club and one for the DLC? If so, I didn't even get my DLC one, the guy at the store told me that I just needed to sign up with the first one and it'd give it to me.

Friggin Gamestop, man. And I know I probably tossed the receipt since it was all paid through store credit. Wonder if they'd give me my DLC card if I showed them I had the preorder card. Frig.

@Outrun1986: For the most part, you're wrong. I've been following the promotion all summer (and netted about 70 free songs in the process), so allow me to correct you...

First, the site wasn't "down for the majority of the contest" - until the end of the promotion, you could generate all of the 360 or PS3 codes you wanted, with a few hiccups along the way (a batch of new songs added toward the end of August had buggy redeems for about a week).

The problem you faced is that the demand for Wii codes far, far exceeded what they had available. The Wii codes are shorter than the 360 and PS3 codes (meaning less combinations of letters and numbers, meaning less codes that can be generated at once), and I don't think Nintendo has a system set up to automatically generate codes on the fly because, until this promotion, they didn't need one. As far as I can tell, Pepsi had to add codes to the site manually and wait on Nintendo to restock.

The reason why they ran out so quickly? There are people in forums I read that had literal hundreds of wins to redeem - I know people that maxed out both their Wii and DS to the point cap, which is something like $200 worth of points. Each.

If you want to blame somebody, blame the people who bought caps off of eBay, or scavenged recycling centers or trash cans in their office. From what I saw, Pepsi did the best they could to keep the codes in stock, and did their best to try and let people know when restocks were coming (through support e-mails and their Twitter account). Given the relative sales of the game, Pepsi probably didn't guess that the demand for Wii points would be so much greater than for songs for the other systems.

I'm also pretty sure that they never went a month between restocks; you probably just missed one of the short windows where other people made off like a bandit.

And you're wrong about the end date of the promotion - the promotion was always supposed to end on the 13th. The 30th is the last date where you can redeem your instant win prizes for song codes or Wii points, and that's all it's ever been.

@Alessar: That promotion got milked even worse than this one did. Pepsi had a website where you could generate codes on the fly...with no limitation on how many times you could do it. All you had to do was enter something that resembled an e-mail address, and you got your points.

At the beginning, they had a website full of DVDs, CDs, and electronics up for grabs. Those vanished a month or two into the promotion because Pepsi took about three weeks to actually catch and correct the badly coded website.

The sad thing? All they really needed to do was to send the code to your e-mail address instead of giving it to you on the spot (requiring a real address instead of random letters), and most of that abuse would've been impossible.

Saying that winning $2 on a $1.50 product is winning is misleading, since the soda and digital distribution of music probably are about a nickels worth of actual production cost.

Actually, assigning a product an arbitrary value and then giving it away as a prize is a great marketing technique to convince people that the prize is worth something. It helps you establish a value for your product. Since the actual distribution cost for digital music is essentially zero and even the bands get publicity out of it there is no downside, except for the customer who gets duped into believing they are getting fair value for the soda AND winning something.

@dragonfire81: Lies.

During the entire promotion, I won $716 worth of Nintendo Points by redeeming 479 caps. Even if I had purchased each of these Pepsi's at their full price of $1.38 (after tax), I still came out about $55 ahead. Now, factor in the fact that:

A.) About half of the caps came from co-workers who just gave them to me.
B.) About 150 of them were purchased online for fifty to twenty-two cents each.
C.) The Pepsi I drank was soda I would have drank anyway.

I'd say I got a good deal and a lot of prizes.

@jezebelseven: They said the same thing to me with GH5 - "The code is in the case." I opened the case about 30 minutes later while eating near Gamestop, found it wasn't there, and went back to the store. They had the codes in a separate stack.

On a related note, I got my Beatles bonus card, no problems.

@Deezul_AwT: just goty a reply from my tip stating consumerist is looking into it.

@shepd: It wasn't necessarily hacked. I remember working with random number generators in my compsci classes. The outcome of event #1 should have no impact on the outcome of event #2. So if, for example, I was repeatedly trying to generate a random number between 1 and 10, I could get a whole series of 7's. I would expect their program came up with an outcome when someone entered a code, checked that against the number of times that outcome had already come up and the number of times that outcome was allowed, and determined whether you actually got the prize. So if Pepsi said there were 1000 bottlecaps and 100 of those were good for a free bottle of Pepsi, and your code came up as winning a bottle of Pepsi, they'd check to see whether any of the 100 were still unclaimed. If somehow those 100 were claimed early in the contest, if you tried later, you might have a winning outcome from their random number generator, but you still wouldn't get a prize.

@nacoran: I'm not sure what you're talking about, but the songs are $2 each via the in-game store in Rock Band. I don't know where the "arbitrary value" crap comes into play - the songs are $2.

I drank a lot of pepsi for this fucking contest. I hope there's a class action or something to come out of it.