Microsoft recently added an update that let Xbox owners gift others copies of video games. The update comes during the holiday rush in which shoppers are more than likely to buy in bulk thanks to the Black Friday discounts. While game gifting sounded simple in premise it seems that there is still some idiocy’s to deal with. Ray Cox, the man with the highest achievement score on Xbox Live, was gifted a game by his twitch follower.
Thank you StarString12495 for Xbox gift. 💚🎁 pic.twitter.com/fHPvcq8C5Y
— Stallion ver.2.3 (@Stallion83) November 16, 2017
Unfortunately the unexpected happened. The game wouldn’t activate because of regional prices. Much like Xbox owners can’t just switch regions with a click of a button and buy games at the cheapest prices, it seems Microsoft doesn’t want gamers to be gifted the cheapest priced games from foreign regions.
Well, I tried to redeem the gifted code but….. pic.twitter.com/ymtRTqPpCO
— Stallion ver.2.3 (@Stallion83) November 25, 2017
This is extremely counter intuitive to the idea of gifting but this type of behavior isn’t exactly uncommon for Microsoft. Originally the Xbox One featured DRM, a security measure to prevent pirating, that wouldn’t even allow for physical games to be shared to other Xbox owners. Like the DRM issue, hopefully we will get to see an update that fixes the issue. For now make sure you don’t gift games to people in other countries, they may not work on reception.
