Gold Live members: Free premium Winter Holiday theme

by Richard Mitchell on Dec 10th 2008 1:30PM

Pssst. Hey, Gold Xbox Live members, over here. This post is just for you. Are the Silver members gone? Good. Okay, here's the deal. Major Nelson has informed us that you (just you, not Silver members) are now entitled to a free Winter Holiday theme. Since neither Major nor Xbox.com provide any images of the Winter theme, we snapped a quick spy picture. We even made it kind of blurry and took at an awkward angle to make it seem more clandestine. Cool, huh? Anyway, like we said, it's free. You can download it by clicking this link. Just don't tell the Silver members. If they ever learn of our opulence, surely they will revolt.

Source

Tags: live-marketplace, marketplace, themes, xblm, xbox-live-marketplace

Reader Comments (41)

got it this morning

They still need to speed Xbox.com up, takes ages to load now... though marketplace can drag too

It's pretty cool.

Yeah, but what the f is a winter holiday? I'm gonna go ahead and call this the Christmas theme. Gez, I'm so sick of political correctness.

Agreed. I'm going with the title of "Christmas Theme" as well.

To us southern hemisphere residents, it's a winter theme. As for us, Christmas takes place in the middle of summer. We spend Christmas at the beach, eating BBq food, and drinking cold beers.

damn you miiiicrrooosoooffftttt.

Discrimination against people who don't use live enough to warrant a gold membership.

I was a little annoyed when my year subscription I got with my original xbox (and didn't use until last year) ran out and I reverted to a silver membership only to be confronted by a "not available for silver members" type screen when I tried to download a new demo. It's like they want people to pay for better service. (note unobvious sarcasm not conveyed in the medium of text)

Xbox Live Silver Members can go to the back of the bus.

Xbox Live is only $38.99 or $3 a month! I have never paid $50 in the 5 or so years on Live.

http://x2theg.blogspot.com/2008/12/xbox-live-gold-deals.html

Another thing, Premium theme's are only useful if you have Xbox Live Gold since their made to view all your friends avatars separate or in a party with props behind each group of avatars.

If you don't have a Gold account then you probably don't have friends and if for some reason you do have a few friends, you can't join their party so Premium themes are useless to you with a Silver account.

Pony up and grab a deal for Xbox Live Gold or don't and be theme-less!

Nothing against not paying for live, but there should be perks like this available to gold members. It should be available to silver also, but for a price.

Like... $50 a year?

-yawn-
I'm thankful, I used to play a game that cost $10 a month.. and had two accounts. Now I pay $50 for 13months of XBL (card from a retailer.)

pwn

I was thinking on a pay per item scheme. Oh, I remember the days when there was no such thing as gold and silver accounts...

11p a day.. (20cents??) are you really gonna miss that? I don't & I rarely play anything online..

Though some kind of perk for paying members would be a good thing..

@ Mazrael

why do you pay full price for XBOX Live cards? you can get a 12month card from Play re-seller for 8p per day/£30 per yr!

Yeah, I have seen them here in the US for about 35 before on amazon. I think 40 is a price you can usually find them at.

I'm loving the xbox.com/XBL Marketplace combination dealy, its nice

Heh, I think all premium themes should be free to gold members.

Sweet beans! This looks pretty awesome.

It would never happen but I would love if they had a points allowance system. Where if you were a gold every month you would get like 250 points to buy whatever you want themes, pics, videos.

I know it would never happen, but one can dream.

Neat, thanks for the heads up.

Out of all 3 consoles I do enjoy my 360 more than the rest, But Microsoft really does need to give some better reasons to pay for Live. P2P gaming should be free.

Themes and Gamerpics should be included for Gold membership.

Online Saved games should be apart of the Gold membership.

and STOP with the bullshit feature disparity between Gold and Silver.

Saying that getting demo's one week early for a gold account isn't a highlight to having gold subscription.

It's got to suck to be a Corporate goon sometimes, I know all of the Xbox Division guys that have to enforce these feature disparity rules upon Gold and Silver members just feel dirty.

Microsoft LEARN from your Vista Debacle!

Did anybody notice that it was rated "EC"
I thaought that was pretty funny, being that i'm 37 downloading a winter theme for my kids* and I. :-)
*ok, me*

I still miss the old dashboard. And no theme is going to wash over the counter-intuitive lousy Wii-ripoff that has taken its place.

Everything's a rip off of everything else. Most ideas are purely original. The refinement of the ideas of others. It's what makes the world go round.

Man... people love to complain about $50/year.

If you have a problem coming up with $50/year ($4.17/month)... you probably have bigger issues to deal with.

And figured that this theam if it COST something would be 250 points, like other Premium themes. There's half the Gold monthly cost right there, if you purchase yearly Gold cards.

It IS nice to see MS coming out with more Gold Only bonuses.

$50/year.... if people knew how to search online, they could get it cheaper.

Too true. Even though I have 9 or 10 months left on my current subscription. I just snagged a 13 month gold membership on Amazon for $37. That equates to just over $3 a month.

Huh? Freebies given to non-US LIVE subscribers?

WTF? Something doesn't seem right here :|

you know canada gets a lot of the things that US does right? I subscribe to the major nelson RSS and most of the freebies are "all regions." the only freebies in US are the ones that are by promotional products specific to US only

(my American cousin who's staying over for the holidays recovered his GT, and even that free US content is available to download through his account.)

sorry if I made this sound like a rant, its not. it was supposed to be an informative post

I had to put it on my download list on Xbox.com since I just literally came back from the UPS store. I figure most of you can guess what I was doing there.

oh oh oh, free free free.. damn im loving the xbox.com xbl combo.. so much easier to queue up downloads here than with a controller on the 360..

(B!tching below: you have been warned)

cant you cry babies just be happy you got something free today? if you dont have a gold membership go get one and get over it cheapskate: if its true the average gamer is well beyond their teenage years this really shouldnt be an issue..

XBL should not be free: pvp is not a right and multiplayer is not guaranteed to everyone. if you cant spend 60 a year on a membership wtf do you have a $300 console that has $60 games?

I expect a high quality service already and its not gonna get better if it hemorrhages cash. xbl gives me the most return for my money and im happy to pay for it..

Richard

This post was full of WINNNNN!!!!1 :)

@ Mazrael

why do you pay full price for XBOX Live cards? you can get a 12month card from Play re-seller for £30 per yr/8p per day!

The peasants are revolting!

Well the winter holiday theme does nothing for me. Here in the South Pacific it's Summertime.

Maybe I'll get it and store it away for next July...

At last! I knew I'd finally get my reward for being a Gold subscriber since the day I got a 360.

Good ol' Microsoft, I knew they'd come through in the end.

(Please sprinkle a generous helping of sarcasm on this comment)

in case nobody noticed... the theme is for everybody now, even silver.

anyone know how i can still get this theme?

please send me a reedem code for gold membership please PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

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Gold Live members: Free premium Winter Holiday theme

Reader Comments (41)

Posted: Dec 10th 2008 1:38PM MDK2002 said

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