MyGamerCard.net Bids Farewell to the Xbox Community

One of the most prolific sites for the Xbox community has officially called it quits. MyGamerCard.net was once used by over 5 million people to display gamertags proudly on pages around the internet. Morgon, the developer and founder of the site blames Microsoft itself for the downfall of the site.
 
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 for MyGamerCard 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.

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.

Morgon even mentions that he has been running the site partially out of pocket for the past year, a testament to his love for the site. Regardless of the reasoning behind the demise of the site, it's sad to see such an active part of the community get dismantled.

For Morgon's entire statement check out the Farewell to MyGamerCard here.