Hmm, sounds like it could be good so long as Amazon have the sense to drop prices when games stop selling. (since the Xbox Live team obviously hasn't!)

nice, now when I want that 800mp game I wont have to buy a 1600mp card.

US only, sadly.

"Online Game Code: Currently, this item is available only to customers located in the United States and who have a U.S. billing address."

So this is US only?

cool thinks huh,lol

Very cool, I'm sure to use this at some point. Hopefully it's more user friendly than the pitifully slow online marketplace off of xbox.com

mh... when it's in europe or especially in germany?

hey Major

My name is william, i live in guatemala now but i used to live in boston MA, were i bought my xbox, but as i said i live in guatemala now and i have my xbox live gold suscription and some microsoft points, the thing is that i love to play call of duty worl at war and when i've tried to download the map pack 1 it show me a message telling me that it was not possible to download it at my current location, which is weird because im allowed to download everything else (demos, themes, picture packs, etc) please major help us (central america xbox users) because we feel abandoned since we dont have xbox live support or anything that help us here i thik it is easy for you to contact the people in charge to manage the country block for the map pack my game tag is KBalam GT so you can check my status.

Look at the bigger picture here. With any luck, eBay will hopefully flood with codes before too long and we can pick these up on the cheap, since Arcade codes are multi-region.

It always seems like stating the fact that a specific feature is "U.S. only" is always an afterthought.  Whenever Microsoft comes out with these features (such as Amazon's service, Netflix support, the introduction of dashboard videos like Major's Minute), or almost any other company for that matter (most recently, the announcement of the OnLive service), they always seem to forget that it is important to other demographics to know whether said service(s) will be available in their regions as well.

Major Nelson, for example, can almost never remember to include this information is his posts, and always ends up adding a "Edit: US Only" note, as he did here.  Seriously, these companies need to start hiring individuals whose job it is to keep other demographics informed about the availability of new services in their regions.  If the Xbox and its services are supposed to be global, why not informed people using the same mindset?

/rant

It's interesting that Lost Cities is available on Amazon, but it can't be purchased on XBL Marketplace (it no longer exists).  I wonder, then, if the Lost Cities code you purchase from Amazon will even work!

This is actually amazing! So like now I can purchase a code and run a contest or something. Or even give a game to someone!

Hmm except the pricing is incorrect on some titles, a couple for example: Feeding Frenzy 1 and Gauntlet are both $10 on amazon, but $5 on marketplace.

Very cool. Although, will they ever be cheaper than MSRP? It is usually the only time I stock up on those things... woohoo!

goodweed you are not the only one

So is the point of this offering to allow you to gift XBLA codes to another person?  Thats cool, but Amazon isnt the first to do this, are they?  I seem to recall you can buy these kinds of things at GameStop, and similar places.

No thanks, there is a gamestop just down the road so no problem just going in there for some points.

If you hate US-only and/or forgetting to tell us it's US-only rate this post one star.

The next generation of consoles are likely to be even more dependant on downloadable games. As internet access speeds increase and as the cost of storage reduces, there will be a tipping point very soon where the same dramatic movement from physical media to electronic media will happen for console games, as it already has done for music and (to a slightly lesser extent) in the PC game market.

MS have quite rightly been keen to exploit this trend by selling full copies of XBox Original games and of course with XBox Live Arcade. However there has been a problem in that the only way somebody could buy these games was through MS themselves. MS set the cost of the downloads and nobody else up until now has been able to provide any competition. At least in the PC market there is Steam and Direct2Drive and other services. With music, there is iTunes, Amazon and a host of others. But if you want to buy a downloadable game for the 360, there is only one place to buy it from. The same of course can also be said for Sony and Nintendo.

This announcement is a very important first step to Microsoft breaking their own monopoly on downloadable content. I applaud them for taking this step early instead of (as has been the case in the past) being dragged through the courts.

There are two more steps which are equally important and must be taken as soon as possible.

Firstly, this needs to be extended both beyond the US and beyond a single supplier (one competitor where MS can easily control the wholesale price and possibly even the selling price is not real competition!). Anybody who wants to sell a downloadable game online for the XBox should be able to buy the rights to distribute that game wholesale from the publisher. It should then be up to them to choose the price at which to sell that download. This will encourage competition and will ensure that there is pressure throughout the supply chain to keep prices at a sensible level - the retailers will compete with each other and will in turn put pressure on the publishers to price their content competitively.

Secondly, as we move away from physical media, it is absolutely vital that we are given the right to resell our licences from games when we have finished with them. The secondary market is phenomenally important to the video game industry. Younger gamers in particular may get a console for Christmas or for a Birthday, but often cannot afford many full price releases. To be able to buy a game second-hand and to trade in games which they have completed is very important. If in the future only full price games will be available as downloads, then such people will no longer be able to buy the games. This is actually bad for MS, Sony and Nintendo because the ability to trade-in games allows people who could not otherwise afford it to buy new games. Also people who cannot afford new games won't want to buy a console if they can't afford the games.

My suggestion is that MS should allow people to sell their licences in a secure environment within NXE. At the moment MS and the original publisher get no money at all when a second-hand game is sold in a shop. By providing an auctioning/brokering facility, MS and the original publisher could take a small percentage on each transfer. There could be a limit on how soon licenses could be offered for trade (e.g. 6 months) which would ensure some protection to the price when the game is first released. But after this protected period, it would be an added incentive to lower the price of older games as used licenses flow back onto the market. I don't know how quickly sales for XBLA games drop off, but I suspect that many of the older games see very few sales these days. There could well be a bump in revenues at the point in time when licenses are first allowed to be sold second-hand (through the collection of commission charges when a code is transferred). So the publisher and MS make more money for something which they have already sold once and those people who couldn't afford the game when it first came out (or were willing to wait) get the game at a cheaper price. Simultaneously, people who have sold the games have more money to spend on new games - especially if the proceeds of the sale are paid into the seller's Live profile as MS Points and they have to do an additional step to transfer the cash value to their bank account - they may well be tempted to spend the points in the Marketplace instead of converting the points back to cash.

Everybody wins.