Xbox Live doesn’t like people moving countries!

When I moved to the UK, I had owned an American Xbox 360 and thus had an American Xbox Live account.

Before I left the USA, I ebayed my American box and upon arriving in the UK, I bought a UK box. I signed in via my Xbox Live account and voila, everything worked. Until recently…

When I received my Xbox back from the 3-rings-of-death hotel, all of a sudden, all the content that I had bought during the 8 month interval was no longer playable, with a ‘location issue’ being reported as the error. Turns out that I had been accessing the US version of the Xbox dashboard this entire time.. oh well. It’s understandable that they’d want me to only have access to the UK version while in the UK. Fine. I’m ok with that. What do I need to do to change locations?

Well, I figured that if I went to account management I would simply be able to change my account’s location and all things would be good in the world. I guessed wrong.

Turns out YOU CANNOT TRANSFER AN XBOX LIVE ACCOUNT from one country to another. That means that if you have any global travel inclinations, you will have to have a DIFFERENT gamer tag for each country. This is unacceptable to me considering that it basically means starting from scratch with a new tag and none of the achievements for each game you beat with your old tag. MSFT needs to figure out a way of either transferring old accomplishments onto a new gamer tag for a new location, or allowing gamer accounts to change their region if they move. All else is just nonsensical.