Microsoft Support now accepting requests to change Microsoft Account Regions

It seems the sky has fallen, and Microsoft has finally bent to the reality that people do actually move from country to country.

The company is now accepting requests to have one’s region re-allocated from one supported country to another.

The process appears to be manual, and can take up to 6 weeks to complete, and the account is unavailable during the period. Also some content, especially Xbox Live games, may be lost during the process.

The solution, thought extremely clunky, is better than nothing, and hopefully once 1 billion people have Windows 8 PC’s with Microsoft Accounts built-in, Microsoft will stream-line it for the hundreds of thousands of people migrating each year.

Update: See a letter we received from a reader who has been through the migration process end to end after the break.

I just saw your article about xbox account migration.

I also saw a lot of comments about how the process plays out. Well about 2 months ago I emailed Steve Ballmer and explained my plight and why I thought not allowing account migration was a bad move. I never got a response from Steve himself, but a day or two later I was contacted by Microsofts “Customer Advocacy and Exception Management Team”. They gave me access to this account migration and my account was finished migrating last week.

During the migration my hotmail address that the account was linked to carried on working without issue.

Once migration was complete when I logged into account.microsoft.com I now had two microsoft personal accounts. One was a UK-Personal (my old account) and a new US-Personal account. My xbox gamertag was moved to the new US-Personal Account as was my purchase history.

In my case I never lost any content (Xbox live arcade games, game add-ons, Games for Windows Live). The only issue I had was then when viewing my purchase history on xbox.com items would show up as ‘unidentified item’. If I clicked to add the item to my download queue it would then show up properly though.

It’s a little clunky but overall it worked. Also, while this isn’t much the xbox customer service gave me a free month of xbox live gold to thank me for my patience.

Thought I would share my experience.

Thanks Jose and Richard for the tip.