[UPDATE]: Microsoft did revoke the Fallout 4 licenses but in exchange gave 10$ to every user as compensation, which is a pretty fair solution in my opinion.

BOOM. pic.twitter.com/kBURBZQC5A

— The Loot Gaming (@TheLootGaming) June 11, 2016

In case you missed it, yesterday Fallout 4’s  Deluxe Edition, Season Pass and every DLC were priced at $0 for about half an hour or so in the Xbox One store. The word quickly extended among twitter and you can probably imagine the rest of the story, it was insane, everybody was talking about it!

Let’s get started with the million dollar question:

Has Microsoft any right to revoke your Fallout 4 license?

I wanted to make this clear from the very beginning; absolutely YES, considering this situation from a legal perspective, Microsoft has every right to revoke your Fallout 4 license as long as you have taken advantage of the Xbox One bug, pricing error or (my favorite term), PROMOTION.

Does that mean that they will actually revoke your Fallout 4 license?

Most likely they will; I bet Bethesda is not happy about this.

no idea. Not my platform. Bug/hiccup. They'll undo it

— Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) June 9, 2016

However, they can always decide to let all of us keep Fallout 4. And you may be asking…

Why would they?

First of all, this could turn out to be bad PR for them. E3 is coming and since its one of the most important events in the video game industry they might not want to have to deal with this specific issue at the moment.

Another good reason could be that the Xbox Support service provided different statements: At first, and being the most common one, they stated that it was part of a “promotion”so there nothing to worry about. Some of the Xbox Support staff  went even further; here are (some of) the different versions of the same story told by them.

Version 1. The $0 price tag is not an error, is the real price and only Gold members can take advantage of this.

 

Version 2. It is a free promotion for all gamers (allegedly checked with higher support).

Version 3. Your Fallout 4 license “will not be revoked from your account since that is our fault in the first place” Once you own it, it will stay on your account.

 

Version 4. You could be charged since it was a bug and you should ask for a refund later.

Time passed and they started changing their versions as you may notice below:

It was not a promotion, there’s no need to give a huge explanation on this, it’s just a common sense thing. There’s also no need to lie; it’s just a bug, not a big deal, that can happen from time to time.

In fact while they were saying it was a promotion this is what happened: it was getting fixed -in other words- the promotion was ending, except for the Automatron DLC, which took a little bit longer to go back to its original price.

From my point of view, this is not about laws or rules (since it’s clear they CAN revoke our Fallout 4 license as I previously mentioned) , this is about emotions. The confusion created by the Xbox Support service led some users into believing that they got a free game from a promotion, and you can’t argue with that.

Consumers were deceived in some way; a lot of people thought it was their lucky day just because of what the Xbox Support service told them. Most of them probably knew it had to be a bug, but if an official suppot team tells you otherwise you will probably end up believing it, specially if it’s positive consecuence for you.

I read a lot of tweets saying Xbox Support service can’t be trusted; if that’s true, it needs to be fixed RIGHT NOW. How can’t you trust a support service? It’s their job to provide information and help users, why wouldn’t you trust an official team? Well, it turns out you should be careful with what they say, and that’s a bit of a disappointment for me.

Others said it’s a third party service, and even if that’s the case, they are using the Xbox name, so they shouldn’t skip their responsibility. A lot of people even got scared from getting possibly banned or charged (which made no sense, but still, it was part of the confusion).

Some may be thinking that this deserves to be compensated-and I bet Microsft can afford it, because if we keep that game, someone will have to pay for all those digital copies; Bethesda sure wants their legitimate profits– while others may disagree on this, but what is clear is that -no matter if our license gets revoked or not- we probably won’t see anything similar happenig again in the near future.

Quick Conclusions

 

-Lack of official Xbox statements to shed some light on this matter.

–Poor answers from the Xbox Support service: different versions were provided to consumers; should we really trust them? That was not very professional from them.

-High chance of getting Fallout 4 license revoked.

-No one will be charged or banned for this.