EB refute greed claims

By Dimorphic

I recently had an interview with the Tweed City EB Games Franchise manager Brent Grigson (who has since left the store and taken up a position in the Australian Army) about the claims from the gaming community that EB were greedy offering the ESA for the Xbox 360 just to make a quick buck and are now caught out because of the unreliability of the early 360 SKUs. You can read the story below which I have written in journalistic ‘hard news’ form, which you would find in a newspaper or news website for a university assignment, but as it is very much relevant to Xbox 360 and the community I thought I’d post it here as well.

Many consumers are unhappy with EB Games no longer offering replacement consoles in line with their extended service warranty, instead refunding all warrantys purchased and cancelling the initiative.

There has been criticism from the gaming community over the cancelling of the warranty, with many calling EB greedy for offering the warranty to make a quick buck and cancelling it after the hardware problems the Xbox has became apparent.

When asked about the claims, Tweed City franchise manager Brent Grigson said “I don’t think so. We tried to do the right thing by our customers, giving them more security with their purchase. It ended up that EB was losing out, so we ended the warranty but still refunded our customers their money.

“We are no longer able to take broken consoles as per our agreement with Microsoft, we are only doing as we are asked by them.

“I love the 360 as a gaming console, you look at the library of games out at the moment on the platform and say to yourself ‘that’s the console I should get’, but with the problems the hardware has you have to re-think that standpoint.

“The good news is that the new Pro SKUs and Elite SKUs have a much lower fail rate and are a more reliable console but you have to wonder if the damage done by the earlier fiasco will come back to bite Microsoft.”

Microsoft has responded to the hardware troubles, extending their first party warranty from the stock one year agreement to three that covers all general hardware failures resulting in a red ring.