Something I noticed today after turning on my Xbox One was a new promotional tile to the right of the main boxes that apparently wanted to give me Xbox Live Gold for just one Australian dollar (I’m an Australian living in Australia so it’s not that totally random). Upon clicking on it, I was brought to a fullscreen banner promoting this new campaign which apparently is limited to one month of the premium subscription service for this super-cheap price.
Funnily enough, when I clicked on the button to purchase a month of Xbox Live Gold for AU$1, I was brought to the usual screen to buy it for the full price of AU$10.95 (Whoops!). A quick tweet to Microsoft later and I’m reassured that this bug is being worked on but what isn’t clear is which regions this campaign is running in and which users it is being shown to.
It’s possible that just displaying this ad was a technical glitch on Microsoft’s part and it’s supposed to be shown on Xbox One’s that don’t currently have Xbox Gold Live (a lot of the text does seem like it’s targeted to those new to the service) but it’s also possible that this is a form of compensation for the recent service downtime that prevented users from accessing online services. Microsoft’s Larry Hryb recently revealed in a Reddit Q&A that he was considering giving users some form of compensation for the loss of service. Perhaps this could be it.
There has been no official word from Microsoft yet on this campaign but we’ll make sure to mention when they say something one way or the other and if it’s available to all Xbox One users or just a select few. Have you been given this special offer on your Xbox One? Let us know if you have and also what region you’re in in the comments below.
