Mygamercard.net Shuts Down, Blames Lack of Support From Microsoft

Today is a sad day for Xbox gamers.  Since the inception of the gamercard many years ago, gamers were dieing for alternatives to the plain Xbox.com provided gamercard.  In came Mygamercard.net an amazing service which provided much more stylized gamercards and ones that fit better with forums around the internet.  Mygamercard.net spawned many similar sites and other community based projects over the year.

However, in the past few years, that love for community has been lost by Microsoft. The closure of customer-to-company community-centric interfaces (that weren’t tech support (no disrespect towards the awesome @XboxSupport!)) was a huge blow for Xbox fans. Especially those who really felt like they had a connection to the company they were spending their disposable income on. Similarly, the Xbox Community Developer Program – the program that was essentially created forMyGamerCard and a select few similarly broad-minded community projects – stagnated, with extremely few updates or new data features (despite constant requests), and waning communication as Xbox was not allocating any time to the program.  Seeing the surge of community projects based off the data being feed from Xbox Live, Microsoft created the Xbox Community Developer Program.  However it seems the support for the program from Microsoft has lessened over the years and Mygamercard.net has felt letdown.  Add to the mix many sites that were not part of XCDP starting to pull data in less then respectful ways began to hurt Mygamercard.net’s traffic.  So after a y ear of supporting the sites costs out of pocket, it’s founder Morgon(gamertag) has pulled the plug.
It is a sad day as I remember being part of the Mygamercard beta many many years back, and have used their gamercards ever since they launched.  It’s also sad that a console and brand that was built on community and praised community during it’s inception has apparently lost it’s focus on the community and those who support it.  Maybe this big loss to the Xbox community will cause some of the Xbox team to open their eyes and get back to their roots.  I mean how many of us are still waiting for our “beta” ball icons to return on the Xbox.com forums?? Here is a little excerpt from Mygamercard.net’s goodbye, you can read the full letter here:

To make matters worse, while most of us who insisted on playing by the rules (Terms of Use) of the XCDP, others were showing their lack of respect and selfishness by setting up ‘screen scraping’ mechanisms to gather additional data from the Xbox website that are otherwise unavailable to us. If you’ve ever been to Xbox.com and noticed how slow it is – they are the reason why. These sites – some of them for-profit corporations – benefit from having the type of information that the rest of us had been asking for, which quickly started eating away at our traffic. Repeated discussions with Microsoft regarding this issue have gone largely unacknowledged (and certainly un-actioned) by anyone beyond my initial contact.

Eventually, the rise of these websites, coupled with the declining advertising ecosystem, pushed my out-of-pocket expenses upwards as advertising alone couldn’t maintain the (quite modest, comparatively) monthly hosting fees.