Microsoft has announced the game they will be giving away free to users that were affected by the Xbox Live outages. That game is Undertow (an 800 point value).

As you can expect, the comments on the Gamerscore Blog post are already asploding with posts saying things like, “what if I already purchased Undertow?” According to a comment from John Porcaro, those people should call Xbox Support which is “prepared to take care of you.”

I have to say, I’m pretty disappointed for a couple of reasons. First, a lot of people have probably already purchased this game. Now they’re all going to have to deal with Xbox Support, which I can personally tell you is huge hassle. Second, I didn’t care for the trial version of Undertow, so I don’t know that I really want to play it.

I think MS is handling this situation all wrong. They need to give away a new game to everyone when it’s released and they needed to say that when they announced they would be giving away a free game. That would solve several of the issues they will now be dealing with. First, you don’t have to worry about the people that already purchased it. Second, it would prevent people from not buying games until they heard which one was going to be free. Third, you wouldn’t have to worry about people saying, “I already played the Trial version and it sucked.” It would have been a great way to prevent a lot of the fires they’re now going to have to put out.

I’m just saying…