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Following a troubled period for Microsoft’s gaming network Xbox Live that saw many users’ service disrupted over the traditionally gamer-friendly Christmas period, Microsoft has stated that it is to offer a free Arcade game to all subscribers.
The announcement, which was made through Major Nelson’s blog, stated: During this past holiday season you helped us break a number of Xbox Live records. This included our largest sign-up of new members in our five year history and just yesterday you broke the record for the single biggest day of concurrent members ever on the service.
As a result of this massive increase in usage we know that some of you experienced intermittent Xbox Live issues over the holiday break. While the service was not completely offline at any given time, we are disappointed in our performance.
I would like to take this moment to thank you each and every one of you for your patience and understanding as our team has worked around the clock to return the service to a stable state.
At the same time we would like to offer a token of our appreciation to all of you in celebration of record success for the service. And as a thank you for your loyalty during this holiday period, we will be offering all of our Xbox Live members around the world access to a full Xbox Live Arcade game that will be available to download free of charge. In the coming weeks we will be sharing the specific details of this offer with you.”
Whether this will take the form of a specific download, or whether users will be able to download any title of their choice, is not yet known.
