Over the years I’ve played a number of games starting ones on 8-bit consoles (NES clones), much more advanced Sega Mega Drive (16-bit) and, skipping first generation Sony PlayStation, moved to PC gaming. With whole industry passionately waiting for new Xbox One X to be released in the end of 2017 I decided to give myself a treat and get this powerful console. While more detailed review is planned later, today I’ll describe how to get Xbox Live Gold subscription in unsupported country.

Xbox Live Gold which is paid subscription service allows members to play online, use extra benefits provided as coupon codes in game boxes and receive additional content like free games and other stuff. E. g. this month Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate is available as a free download – quite awesome indeed.

Unfortunately geo-blocking is still happening – I live in Lithuania which despite of being European Union member since 2004 is still unsupported in Microsoft Shop to buy Live Gold subscription. User support was friendly but couldn’t help except stating that they “constantly work to add more countries to Xbox Live Gold”. Well, how hard can it be?

Closest country that is suppotred was Poland but switching region to this neighbouring country I’ve got all news and hints in Polish so that was inconvenient. To have console in English I had to switch to US or UK was another option. Then however trying to buy Xbox Live Gold subscription I was asked for US address. Friends told me that credit card issued in US is not mandatory but the physical address is a must. Well, I could switch to UK and ask some of my friends who emigrated to UK some time ago but that looked as an inconvenient as well.

Searching forums for solution brought me to eBay where you can easily buy coupons (or the key codes printed on them) of various lengths ranging from several days to months of subscription. So I picked a seller with few hundred good feedback and almost instantly got a link to download a coupon. It looked like a scanned version of paper sheet and together with three months subscription code carried a text saying it was “Made in Singapore”. Well, let’s see if it works.

Couple attempts to redeem it at Microsoft’s page didn’t work out – every time I’ve got “Something went wrong” error despite the code being correctly identified as “Prepaid 3M Xbox LIVE Gold” coupon. I was already disappointed and asked seller for a refund as the coupon didn’t work but luckily tried one more way – activated code from within console.

In Xbox console I pressed Home button, scrolled to Microsoft Store and found Redeem a Code button. Entered the code in input box and… successfully activated! Great success.

Will update information when I reach a point of renewing subscription but for now it seems the solution works smooth.

With valid Xbox Live Gold subscription I managed to activate a bunch of coupons I had in game boxes – Prestige Pack for Assetto Corsa, Hyundai R5 rally car for DiRT4, Hitman Requem Pack and few more.

In case you’d like to find me on Xbox community my gamer tag is gytisrepecka 🙂 And don’t forget to subscribe my YouTube channel for gaming videos (currently several Need for Speed Payback videos posted there) and my Instagram account for gaming hardware photos!