We knew it wouldn’t be long, but now Microsoft are finally acting on users outside of the US accessing content on the US Marketplace. More specifically, they are preventing people buying stuff from the Video Marketplace outside of the US to protect copyright laws. They are now stopping credit cards from working if the billing address and country don’t match up. Great solution, if every country in the world was supported by Xbox Live. Sadly it isn’t, and there are some big upsets.

A recent security change to the Xbox Live service may have impacted users online purchase experience. Currently the video marketplace service and related content is only available to consumers in the United States. Although we will continue to work on providing content and rolling out the service in other markets, US Marketplace offers will be restricted to the US only. This means that the credit card associated with your account is required to match the billing address and country your account is set up in. Note that we are not banning any of these Xbox Live accounts, as they can continue to use pre-paid subscription cards and Microsoft Points cards.

But can YOU still get it?

Herein lies the problem: many countries, or in the case of South America, continents, are not supported by Live, so they have to choose a different country and can only get points via their credit/debit cards, since shops obviously don’t have point cards on sale. Others will get cut off simply because they have migrated to another country. If you used to live in America, but have since moved to say, Hong Kong, but kept your American GamerTag, you too could be in for some problems.

Whilst this seems grossly unfair, you have to remember that Microsoft don’t want to be sued by the content suppliers of the Video Marketplace, nor do they want to lose any content. What MS should really have done was get content ready for every region and release it in one big go, so that everyone is happy. But that’s not practical and it takes time, which MS didn’t have since they wanted to get the Video Marketplace up and running as soon as possible to rival the PS3 and Wii. Major Nelson has this to say on the matter:

We also realize that there may be a small number of international users that were impacted by this change that have a legitimate reason for why their billing location does not match their account location. We are working to deal with these exceptions on a case by case basis and are working on a solution for these consumers.

Access to this content from outside the US is naughty and shouldn’t be attempted

Case by case? They might be some time. I really can’t see how they are going to satisfy everyone until they just release Live globally, in every country. Until then, those saying ‘help me, I’m in a non-Live country’ could just get the response ‘tough luck’, since MS do not support Live there and so people technically shouldn’t have it.

It’s all a bit of a mess at the moment, but it will be interesting to see just how all these problems are sorted out. Could all this affect the numbers on Xbox Live? Quite possibly, but I think MS would be more worried by the movie companies’ lawyers right now than a £40 a year subscription.