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Joystiq

Preview premium NXE themes before you buy

by Dustin Burg on Jan 28th 2009 8:30AM

Like a Phoenix rising from the ashes of the long defunct Dashboard Themes website, comes a new site that has the simple goal of giving XBLM consumers a chance to preview premium dashboard themes. NXE Themes has screenshots of the entire catalog of premium dash skins, including all free and paid content. It's quite the nice community service NXE Themes is offering, seeing that a premium download can cost upwards of 250 Microsoft points.

The only negative we can find with the site is the amount of bandwidth that is required. Dial-up users stay far, far away.

[Thanks, NBA Kirkland]

Source

Tags: dashboard-themes, microsoft, new-xbox-experience, nxe, themes, xbox-360

Reader Comments (32)

Braid theme is free?

Just checked the marketplace, it's 250 points

http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/media/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d802584108ce/

Thank goodness for this, it's a godsend.

Cool.. dunno why xbl didn't already have this

Awesome-o

Here's hoping there will be a Rapture premium theme when Sea of Dreams launches.

finally, i was gonna buy a theme, but ehh, if it sucked i wouldve been pissed

That Rock Band theme is pretty damn sweet, I might have to queue that bitch up while at work.

Call me cynical, but I think the purpose of having no previews like this on the marketplace is to hamper customer's ability to make a considered purchase. I think I've bought 5 or 6 premium themes, all but a couple of them I didn't see before I bought, and just "took a chance" on them. I imagine at least half of all the themes bought were bought in this way, and a lot of those wouldn't have been bought otherwise.

Anyway, it's great to have a website like this so we don't have to do that anymore. The neogaf forum thread that was serving this purpose wasn't up to much.

I absolutely agree with you. Its actually pretty obvious why XBL do not give you "real" previews. They hope that people will spend money on a couple of themes that really suck until they find one they like.

The fact that Microsoft doesn't provide either a web site like this themselves, or the ability to preview from the NXE itself, shows how much they know the products are generally crap.

That's why they slap "THERE ARE NO REFUNDS" on these purchases. It might as well say "If you buy this, you are stuck with it, even if you hate it."

Nice for the community that a third-party has made the effort to do what MS should be doing, though. Wake up, Microsoft.

I challenge you to find any company that allows refunds for digital content. Of course you are stuck with it if you bought it. There is no way to know whether you copied a file after you downloaded it.

Yeah, no major company would do that. Like Amazon, for instance.

Oh, wait. They DO.

Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200144510

The point isn't the inability to get a refund, but there's no way in the store to even SEE the product. You can't have it both ways. Unless you are Microsoft, of course.

The link to the site is broken.

It seems to have been crushed by billions of people trying to use a service that should have been provided by Microsoft to begin with.

Am I supposed to guess what the link is to this site or am I just missing something here ?

It's called a hyperlink, welcome to 1994.

http://nxethemes.com/

Give him a break! There were 3 links in there, and it was the last one! I was thinking the same thing at first.

I guess there's no need for the 'Source' link then, seeing as people clearly don't use it.

Well not single link worked that's why i asked. now shoot , its the end of the world

The link to the site also does not work for me. Must be down.

It's a waste of money to actually BUY a theme.

I agree, the current NXE themes out slap a huge name banner just to promote the game. I hope that trend doesn't contiue though.

A great many things are waste of money, yet they're available for money to change hands.

I purchased the Castle Crashers premium theme because 1) I love the game, 2) I want to give more money to the developers, and 3) I was able to see a preview somewhere and loved how it looked. There's no branding - just bitchin' artwork.

Well, since you've emphasized the word "PAY," this implies you feel the EXACT SAME THEMES are attainable for free. Please share this solution...?

If this is isn't what you meant, then you should have emphasized the word "THEMES."

There must be some serious traffic because its telling me I fail to connect to the server or something along those lines.

I FAIL O_O

Good news, but I have yet to buy any themes, I find more important uses for my cash ¬_¬

what! The link doesn't work!! DAMNIT!!

Oh wow this is great! I've never bought a theme (only downloaded free ones) but I am not opposed completely to it as long as I like it. Though not being able to see it before, always hindered me when it came to purchasing any themes. Thanks MS, for a good way for sucking more MS Points out of me! But, I like the feature!

What's dial-up?

That site hasn't worked since the day it was first shown. All I see everyday I check is we are changing servers and should be back up and running soon then I get redirected.
Still can't believe MS doesn't give us previews, oh wait yes I can believe it because all they care about is nickel and dimeing us to death. The saddest thing about it is that multiple game companies have wanted to give us free premium themes that they have made and MS has always said NO and charged us over 3 dollars for them.

I pray the nxe theme site opens soon cause I really want a new premium theme but refuse to blind buy anymore.

Still not working yet. Too bad there can't be a better way to preview these things.

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Preview premium NXE themes before you buy

Reader Comments (32)

Posted: Jan 28th 2009 8:37AM Ribs said

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