Still No Full LIVE Access in Romania - Open Letter from Gaming Communi Options

[Xbox-Scene]

Still No Full LIVE Access in Romania - Open Letter from Gaming Community Posted by XanTium | January 26 22:14 EST | News Category: Xbox360

From monky.ro: [QUOTE] We, the ROMANIAN owners of gaming consoles, related products and services offered by MICROSOFT CORPORATION, SONY CORPORATION and NINTENDO, as full rights members of EUROPEAN UNION and users of the products and services you sold us, we kindly plead you to consider our petition for enabling full online services and support for ROMANIA. Through this document, we would like to request to be treated according to the EUROPEAN UNION laws, as equals in rights with all the other member countries where these services are available. The products named here as MICROSOFT XBOX 360, SONY PLAYSTATION 3 and NINTENDO WII you sold us and are still selling in ROMANIA, like in any other European country, come with no warnings that the products bought have no support at all in our country. Therefore we would like to benefit from the full online services we paid for. Dear EUROPEAN UNION REPRESENTATIVES, as members of the EUROPEAN UNION, we would like to petition for full rights as everyone else and be able to use the online services and support for the products we paid for. None of the three products named above allow us to use it online in ROMANIA, as there is no such support, although most of us have paid for a product or service that gives us one month, three months, six months or unlimited access to online services. Most of us have bought products (software and hardware) that require a connection to XBOX LIVE or PLAYSTATION STORE, which is impossible as there is no such service for ROMANIA. [/QUOTE] Full Story: monky.ro | sign petition

[midnightcharger2]

Its silly that in the days of the internet, that international communites are restricted / or worse off no service at all.

The other problem is people whom buy consoles from out of country. In my example I am an American living in Japan. I had to buy a NTSC/U as alot of the games are region locked out of Japan consoles. But often I am restricted to downloads from LIVE only from my region despite owning a USA console.
Region coding has always been a terrible idea from the start.

PEOPLE are not region locked so neither should our electronics.

This also goes for internet sites such as MSN video.

Good luck to the people in Romania though.

[GamerBR]

They can easily join Xbox live by simply registering with an address of any other place that has Xbox Live,here in Brazil we also don't have it,but we simply register on Xbox Live using an US address.
Here the official games that are launched(only the ones published by Microsoft) costs about U$88,and the official price of the Xbox is about U$1300,I miss better prices,not Xbox Live being officially launched here-and if it were,I would not change to a brazilian accont,it would for sure cost more than U$50 per year.

[zcz_team]

That sucks for them, hope they get what they paid for.

[Relaxos]

They can easily join Xbox live by simply registering with an address of any other place that has Xbox Live,here in Brazil we also don't have it,but we simply register on Xbox Live using an US address.
Here the official games that are launched(only the ones published by Microsoft) costs about U$88,and the official price of the Xbox is about U$1300,I miss better prices,not Xbox Live being officially launched here-and if it were,I would not change to a brazilian accont,it would for sure cost more than U$50 per year.

My thoughts exactly. Someone needs to tell them this.

[steveju]

Microsoft still needs to get their Live services to Romania, even if they can get full access by circumventing the restrictions when registrering, which I think they have done so far. The whole point of this is that they shouldn't have to circumvent anything.

[panosvo]

There is one more petition for xbox live in Greece

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/XboxLiveGreece

[kidman64]

It's the same thing in poland, although we got dashboard translation, we still want official xbl support. (not that i'd set another account up, i'm good with my irish acc)

[flashfreak]

That is VERY INTERESTING to me, living in AUSTRALIA.

Nah. I dont really care, just found it strange with the capitals in there.

[Chancer]

Every country gets less content than the US. Some get sod all. the service will never be unified across the world Nothing ever is. Signing the (latest fad) petition will not make any difference.
there will be good reasons why XBL is operated like this. Trust me if MS could make a profit from having the service fully functional in Romania they would.
The same petition about the PS3 has been lodged against PS3.
Surely some people have better things to do.

[MonkY2]

Thank you for your support xbox-scene ! We really appreciate your help !

They can easily join Xbox live by simply registering with an address of any other place that has Xbox Live,here in Brazil we also don't have it,but we simply register on Xbox Live using an US address.
Here the official games that are launched(only the ones published by Microsoft) costs about U$88,and the official price of the Xbox is about U$1300,I miss better prices,not Xbox Live being officially launched here-and if it were,I would not change to a brazilian accont,it would for sure cost more than U$50 per year.

GamerBR, we did that untill they've started to use IP checking. Since they started to do that, we are unable to download addons, maps, even demos. We only get "this item is not available from your location". We tried using US/UK/other countries locations. It's not a matter of what country we use, as they check our IP's. But beside that, it's not fair. They sell these products in here oficially, and we can't use them. Maybe we knew how to trick the system by using UK/US addresses (untill now), but remmember some buyers are just kids who just get the console and Gold Accounts for 1 year, and when they join they only get "Your country is not available". It's not fair. Gaming should be allowed in any country, no limits.. or at least that's what i hope for.

Again, i would like to thank you for your support and for taking 20 secconds to sign the petition. We only hope Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will listen us...

[g8crapachino]

Realistically speaking the number of actual subscribers to come out of Romania probable wouldn't justify the cost for Microsoft (or Sony or Nintendo) to setup in that country. The number of 360's sold in Japan probable outnumbers all of Romania ...and Japan isn't that much.

In Addition, this particular statement from the petition is blatantly false, "... Therefore we would like to benefit from the full online services we paid for." ...How could they possibly argue that they are paying for a service they don't have?? Romania ranks as one of those countries with a >90% Software piracy rate. Romanian's need to actually try buying some games and proving that there is a viable market there if they expect Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft to take interest. That alone would be 100% more effective then a worthless online petition.

This post has been edited by g8crapachino: Jan 27 2008, 01:07 PM

[GamerBR]

Thank you for your support xbox-scene ! We really appreciate your help !
GamerBR, we did that untill they've started to use IP checking. Since they started to do that, we are unable to download addons, maps, even demos. We only get "this item is not available from your location". We tried using US/UK/other countries locations. It's not a matter of what country we use, as they check our IP's. But beside that, it's not fair. They sell these products in here oficially, and we can't use them. Maybe we knew how to trick the system by using UK/US addresses (untill now), but remmember some buyers are just kids who just get the console and Gold Accounts for 1 year, and when they join they only get "Your country is not available". It's not fair. Gaming should be allowed in any country, no limits.. or at least that's what i hope for.

Again, i would like to thank you for your support and for taking 20 secconds to sign the petition. We only hope Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will listen us...

This part in bold is weird,because here we just can't download movies and tv shows.We can normally download demos,addons,maps,xbox live arcade games,etc.Anyway,there is a way to download even the protected content,there is one proxy,it's free up to 256kbps and paid for full speed,I forgot the website,I may try to find it again later if you want it.
I didn't understand the part that you say people paid for gold accounts for one year not knowing that the service is not avaliable for Romania,because when registering you don't have Romania in the list of the countries,so if you put an address for other country you are taking the risk.
I agree that Xbox Live should at least allow people from other countries having full acess to it,but as Chancer said,I'm sure they have their reasons.

This post has been edited by GamerBR: Jan 27 2008, 01:12 PM

[MonkY2]

Realistically speaking the number of actual subscribers to come out of Romania probable wouldn't justify the cost for Microsoft (or Sony or Nintendo) to setup in that country. The number of 360's sold in Japan probable outnumbers all of Romania ...and Japan isn't that much.

We are trying to show through this petition we are not that little. And trust me, in Romania Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii are selling like crazy. For example, these days i couldn't even find Wii on stock in every store. They all sold out.

In Addition, this particular statement from the petition is blatantly false, "... Therefore we would like to benefit from the full online services we paid for." ...How could they possibly argue that they are paying for a service they don't have?? Romania ranks as one of those countries with a >90% Software piracy rate. Romanian's need to actually try buying some games and proving that there is a viable market there if they expect Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft to take interest. That alone would be 100% more effective then a worthless online petition.

It's not a false, because in here you can even get 12 months gold card. And on the package it says nothing about not working in our country. Also, Xbox 360 comes with 1 month of gold account. Account for what, if you can't access Xbox Live ? As for the piracy, i think it's in every country, even in US/UK/Jap. Anyway, we are not taking their side. We are the ones asking for Live access, remmember ? And we ask this because we use originals. We can't even play with copies, so, why are we considered helping piracy ? Contrariwise, we can prove that having Live will help reducing piracy. Also, don't forget PS3 has never been hacked, and we also ask for PlayStation Store in the petition.

Anyway, it's just a matter of solidarity for me. And for us gamers. If any other country would need my help to get support, i would do it in an instant. Specially because signing that petition would only take me 20 secconds of my life. And after that i could be happy and glad to help. But maybe it's just me.

Again, thanks goes to everyone helping us. Respect !

[TMownsu]

I hear you on your petition. But right now MS has alot bigger problems then this. They can't even support the US users need since H3 came out. It has been a months & live is still sporadic. If they can't support & fix the issues on US side then how are they going to expand. It all comes down to money, we couldn't even get Nintendo & MS to come to terms on Goldeneye eventhough the game was 2 months from being released. I am probably sure that the install base does not support setting up shop in these territories. Building massive server rooms arent cheap, I am pretty sure the cost of live combined isn't that much when you look at the whole picture of building/maintaning/paying bandwidth of the servers & networks.