Microsoft Points

» see xbox.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

microsoft points launched 22 november 2005, the same day the xbox 360 went on sale. the conversion rate microsoft kept telling people was 80 points per us dollar. the rate people experienced was whichever pack of points they had just bought, because the packs did not divide evenly into the price of the things on sale. you bought 1600 points to spend 1200, and the extra 400 sat in your account until you forgot about them or rounded up on the next purchase. it was a closed loop with leakage built in.

by the time the xbox 360 was the cheap console at the bottom of every electronics store in ankara, the points had become the cultural shorthand for the platform. the friday article about a downloadable game would quote its price in points. people who did not own a 360 still knew the punchline about the math.

by the time i would have bought into the xbox economy, my pc was where everything lived. as a computer engineer in the mid-2000s i had no shortage of arguments about why a console currency that did not equal real money was a worse user experience than the steam wallet, which at least pretended to be dollars. those arguments turned out to be correct in a way that did not feel satisfying.

~ the case file ~

~ the math joke ~

the standard point packs in north america started at 400 for $5 and went up from there in the same ratio. an arcade title might cost 800 points, which meant ten dollars, which you knew if you looked at the receipt. a song on zune cost 79 points, which was 99 cents, and the deliberate not-quite-a-dollar made the song feel like a smaller transaction than it was. the whole point system worked the way casino chips work. the conversion is a tiny tax on attention, and the platform keeps a little extra each time the math fails to round cleanly.

~ how it actually ended ~

microsoft announced the retirement at e3 in june 2013. on 26 august 2013 the xbox live dashboard updated and converted every existing balance into local currency. the converted balance had an expiration of 1 june 2015. zune marketplace, which had already been wound down into xbox music, lost the points alongside it. by the time the xbox one shipped that november, prices were in actual dollars and euros, and the only people who missed the points were the ones who liked the abstraction of not seeing the price.

~ what carried over ~

the points are a small landmark in the long argument about whether a closed platform should run its own currency. facebook credits tried the same trick a few years later for zynga games and got the same exit, while steam wallet kept the local currency from the start and never had this problem. the inheritance microsoft points left is the case study every product designer points at when somebody proposes inventing a token to round the price away from the user. you have already seen this movie.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »