FYI - Xbox LIVE Gold Family Pack is available

[digiram]

Just jumped on the deal because my neice and daughter wanted to renew their accounts. Pretty good deal.

 

[GCS]

It's not really a pain, I was just trying to be thorough and probably wrote a little too much.

Step 1: Recover all the gamertags that are to be entered into the family plan onto one console.
Step 2: Sign up for the family plan while signed into the account that you want to be the primary account holder.
Step 3: Add those recovered gamertags to the family plan when it asks you to.
Step 4: Have all of the secondary accounts go back home and recover their gamertags on their own consoles.

That's it. As long as the secondary account holders are aware that they'll not be able to attach a credit card to their account and that the primary account holder has the ability to change their privacy settings, then you're good to go.

Quick question on this step as I am about to do it myself.

On those accounts that are already setup (ie my kids and my nephew) what do I need to know to recover them to my XBOX and thus add them to my family pack? Just their gamertag or do I need their main email and password as well?

LMK

Thanks

Greg

 

[blurredvision]

Quick question on this step as I am about to do it myself.

On those accounts that are already setup (ie my kids and my nephew) what do I need to know to recover them to my XBOX and thus add them to my family pack? Just their gamertag or do I need their main email and password as well?

LMK

Thanks

Greg

You need to know the email and password to recover a gamertag on your console.

 

[GCS]

Gotcha.

Thanks

Greg

 

[tatteredpotato]

Hell I'd almost do this just to have the extra tags for friends to use when they are over.

 

[GCS]

You need to know the email and password to recover a gamertag on your console.

Just to post back everything worked perfectly for me when I did this last week.

My LIVE account was good for just shy of a year. I had a 12 month live card I got for $29 before the prices went up and used is and then bumped to the family pack. I added all the people who needed it to my console before the upgrade (1 member still had 3 months left on his that MS gave him for free thanks to account issues). Once I upgraded we were good to go for 12 months + we got an extra 2 months for the 3 months of live on the other account.

Other folks recovered their GT and we are all set.

I wonder how long before MS nukes this one as it works great for our needs.

Greg

 

[blurredvision]

I wanted to add a bit of new information. I got my wife to create a new silver account and when I told it that I didn't want to sign up for a Gold subscription, it automatically asks if you want to do a 1-month free trial (I believe each console comes with 5 free trials for new silver accounts). I said yes to the month free trial.

When I added her to the family plan, it took that month she had and rolled it into the family plan, so now I'm good until April of 2012. More of the story is if you're creating a new account, be sure to take the free month trial.

 

[Digital Deed]

Hey GuyS!

So I actually signed up for the family member gold package and it worked well. Myself, I live in Hawaii, my half brother in florida, my step dad also in florida, and my brother-in-law in california got into in easy enough. In fact! Since my half brother and step father both had memberships with time remaining on it it added there time to all four accounts. So we went from 12 months to 16 months. Not just that but my brother-in-law was using a free month trial and it added that month to all 4 accounts. So for $25 a piece we got 17 months of xbox live.

HOWEVER!

After the first week my half brother wanted to add some points to the account. No big deal right? F'n WRONG! We tried it from my console and online at xbox.com. I was able to add the points to my account but it WILL NOT allow me to grant him or any other member of my account ANY microsoft points. I've been talking to the peeps at customer support and they haven't been helpful at all. It is now going on 1 month that my other family members haven't been able to add anything like downloadable content or expansions to any of the games we own. VERY F'n LAME.

If anyone you know is running into the same issues please let me know.

OH! And I asked tech support if we could just break the accounts back up into individual gold memberships again and they straight up told me NO. That I could remove them from the Family Plan but that they would then have to reapply for a gold member package. Basically all the time they had on their accounts they had paid for was gone. No reimbursement, no "sorry about this inconvien", no nothing.

 

[Queasy]

Whose the main account in your family plan. Only they are allowed to buy points and then distribute it to others.

The other option is to purchase MS Points cards. WalMart is running a deal now with a 1600 point card for $15.

 

[mugs]

OH! And I asked tech support if we could just break the accounts back up into individual gold memberships again and they straight up told me NO. That I could remove them from the Family Plan but that they would then have to reapply for a gold member package. Basically all the time they had on their accounts they had paid for was gone. No reimbursement, no "sorry about this inconvien", no nothing.

The time they had on their accounts isn't gone, it's part of the family account now. Microsoft is being pretty generous with adding time from combined accounts, but I'm not surprised that they won't break blocks of time off to form a separate gold account.

I was excited when the family pack was announced, but unless I'm missing something it's missing the one feature that would have made it really useful to me - DLC and XBLA games that are tied to the family account and usable by all of the linked accounts. It's the same as it's always been - content is tied to both the console and the account. By moving my gamertag back and forth I can share content on two Xboxes, but I have four.

Unfortunately I know why Microsoft won't share content between all of the accounts in a family pack - because groups of people would split a family pack and in effect get big discounts on everything, similar to what people do with the PS3. I really hope Microsoft comes up with a better solution to this next generation, but I have a feeling that if they make it any less restrictive it'll be exploited.

 

[blurredvision]

After the first week my half brother wanted to add some points to the account. No big deal right? F'n WRONG! We tried it from my console and online at xbox.com. I was able to add the points to my account but it WILL NOT allow me to grant him or any other member of my account ANY microsoft points. I've been talking to the peeps at customer support and they haven't been helpful at all. It is now going on 1 month that my other family members haven't been able to add anything like downloadable content or expansions to any of the games we own. VERY F'n LAME.

I've not tried giving any of my friends an allowance on our "family" plan, so I can't comment on whether it works or not. However, one friend has already purchased a 4000 point card and redeemed it on his account with no issues.

Does it give you an error when you try to grant allowances?

 

[avner]

Thanks so much for posting this, I was looking online for a while to find the answer and Microsoft's website didn't give a straight forward answer like you did