Pepsi Rock Band Contest Crashes and Burns: Everyone's an Instant Loser?

Pepsi/Yahoo's lucrative Rock Band contest was supposed to award more than 10,000 free Rock Band downloadable tracks (DLC) on the final days of its contest: Sunday and Saturday, Sept 12-13th 2009.  However, it appears the real number awarded may be closer to zero. Whether this was caused by a mistake on Pepsi/Yahoo's part remains to be seen, but many of those who entered the contest over the weekend are left with a sour taste in their mouth.

Update 09/18/09: This story is featured on Consumerist.com: Pepsi Rock Band Contest May Have Been Unwinnable At The End.  (Consumerist.com is Consumer Reports' sister website)

Pepsi had a great thing going on all summer long with their “Drink Up, Rock Out” promotion, in which Pepsi consumers would find game entry codes underneath specially-branded Pepsi Rock Band bottle caps.  Players were then to log onto the Pepsi Rock Band contest website and convert each bottle cap code into game points.  For each game point, the player could decide to spend it on the chance to win 1 of a handful of prizes, including things like The Beatles: Rock Band Limited Edition Premium Bundles, Rock Band 2 Special Edition Bundles, Xbox 360 game consoles, and Rock Band Downloadable Tracks.

Drink a $1.45 Pepsi, Win a $2.00 Song Download (Almost) Every Time

Players quickly noticed that the Rock Band Downloadable Track prize in particular, was a winner virtually every time.

The contest claimed:

During the promotion, MTV and Pepsi will give away a Rock Band®2 Special Edition bundle every hour and thousands of Rock Band downloadable tracks each day.

The contest website spelled this out more clearly, stating the "Number of Prizes" for Rock Band downloadable tracks at "5,000 per day":

(view image full size)

Indeed, Pepsi-drinking Rock Band players were playing and winning Rock Band DLC with especially high success rates. Widespread reports of virtually 100% winning rates fueled Internet buzz on this lucrative promotion.  Several forums created Pepsi Rock Band contest threads of extraordinary length:

DVD Talk Forum: The Official Pepsi caps/Rock Band thread! 25 pages

Official Rock Band Forums: Post your Pepsi Drink Up Rock Out Winnings Here 206 pages

Cheap Ass Gamer Forums: Pepsi's "Drink up, Rock out" promotion – Win DLC and Games! 96 pages

What made this so attractive?  Rock Band DLC normally costs gamers $2.00 USD per song, and the price of a 20oz. Pepsi is about $1.45.  With a nearly 100% win rate, it was cost effective to buy Pepsi for the DLC, even if you didn't drink the Pepsi at all.

For Nintendo Wii Owners, the Prize is $2.00 of Virtual Game Cash – Creating an Underground Market in Pepsi Caps

Nintendo Wii owners in particularly were enjoying this promotion, as the Rock Band DLC prize for Wii owners was given out in the form of its 200 Wii Points equivalent.  However, there was no restriction preventing winners from spending the Wii Points on anything in the Wii Shop Channel, including Guitar Hero World Tour DLC songs, Virtual Console games, or WiiWare games & software. Xbox360 and PS3 owners instead had to select specific DLC songs, for which they would receive a download token code only redeemable for that particular song.

YouTube video demonstrating redemption of a winning Downloadable Track: "Pepsi Rock Band Code + free wii points"

As you can imagine, getting $2.00 worth of Nintendo's virtual cash for $1.45 or less, sparked an underground market in the trade of Pepsi caps:

"325 PEPSI ROCK BAND CAPS" sell for $115.00 on eBay (notice: 2 sold!)

Massive Winning Streaks For Many Players

Forums contained players reporting dozens – or even hundreds – of wins, sometimes without a single loser.

I entered 115 codes total (mostly off of eBay) and won on about 100 of them.

479 points entered.  358 Wins for DLC – or 71,600 in Wii Points ($716)

Total for this promo I entered 905 caps, … So my dlc wins stand at 613, 608 of those I used on wii points.

495 points entered. 365 Wins for DLC – or 73,000 in Wii Points ($730)

So What's the Problem?  A Look at the Final 2 Days of the Contest

Recall the contest website stating 5000 DLC track winners per day, and claiming:

During the promotion, MTV and Pepsi will give away a Rock Band®2 Special Edition bundle every hour and thousands of Rock Band downloadable tracks each day.

Clearly, players were winning and there was no reason to doubt the 5000 tracks being given away every day.  However, not everyone experienced a 100% win rate towards the end of the contest.  A few days before the contest ended, reports started indicating that the odds had taken a steep nosedive:

Well, all my caps are now gone. I lost all of my last 30. I loved the promotion in the beginning, but the way it ended was just pathetic. It went from a 99% chance of a win to a 1% chance.

I redeemed my first code Friday night and immediately won DLC on the first try.  So today (Saturday afternoon) I collect 20 caps and redeem 6 of them, ALL LOSERS.

Just used my last three codes for songs and went 0-fer.

Dang….. I just went 0-6

yeah I'm about 0-30 today.

However, the win rate didn't simply take a nose dive, it seemingly changed to a 100% lose rate.

Pepsi's Rules State: The Final Day of the Contest Will Award All the Instant Win Surplus

Pepsi's Rules State:

1. PROMOTION PERIOD: The Pepsi Rock Band Sweepstakes/Instant Win promotion (the "Promotion") period begins June 2, 2009 at 12:00:01 a.m. ET and ends September 13, 2009 at 11:59:59 p.m. ET

[...]

7. SWEEPSTAKES/INSTANT WIN GAME:

[...]

D. Use a Point to Play an Instant Win Game: There will be up to 24 hourly prizes awarded each day of the Promotion Period. There will be up to 5,000 daily prizes awarded each day of the Promotion Period. If, for whatever reason, there are not 24 hourly prize winners or 5,000 daily prize winners in any given day, the remaining prizes not awarded that day will be accumulated during the Promotion Period and will be added to the daily prize pool on September 13, 2009.

(emphasis mine)

It seems to spell out pretty clearly that:

• Every day, up to 5000 Rock Band DLC tracks will be awarded
• On the final day, Sunday September 13th 2009, the usual 5000 tracks will be given away, PLUS any surplus from the length of the contest that did not get awarded

Clearly, Sunday should have had as many winners as usual, if not more.  That's where things took a turn for the worse.  Much worse.

Suddenly Nobody is Winning, and the Website is Eating Points in a Malfunction

Reports of winners came to a screeching halt Saturday morning. The last report of a contest winner was around midnight Friday night (Saturday morning).

To make things worse, a possible website malfunction Saturday night resulted in the page malfunctioning and instead of the usual "Win/Lose" result screen, entrants were taken back to the contest-entry screen with the error message: "No points available for instant win."

The kicker? Players' entry Points were still being deducted, despite the malfunction apparently preventing the game piece from being entered into the contest. Reports suggest this lasted for at least 12 hours. I can confirm it happened to me, giving me the "No points available for instant win" error, despite having 14 points remaining.

Official Rock Band Forum: "Something strange happened on pepsi" (7 pages)

So the wins have abruptly stopped – nobody is winning at all.  This isn't how the contest was supposed to end.  In fact, the official Rockband.com website showed the following image:

Pepsi Rock Band Contest Crashes and Burns: Everyone's an Instant Loser

Around 3PM Sunday, players noticed the contest appeared to be back up and running normally.  That is, until you attempted to redeem a contest Point to enter the Rock Band Downloadable content contest.

Something definitely different about playing to win DLC.
When I play a point, as soon as I click "Play 1 point now", it immediately goes to the "Sorry … You did not win a Rock Band downloadable track. Would you like to play again? screen." In the past, it used to take a few seconds to process the code and determine if you win/lose. Now it appears it just automatically throws you to the losing screen. I think this promotion is DONE.

I was able to confirm this report.  I have experience as a network/system administrator and am quite familiar with troubleshooting performance bottlenecks and server performance.  When I played the contest originally, the contest web server would take a few seconds to respond, as if to check your game code against its database of winners, before returning whether you were a Winner or Loser.

Instead, now it would immediately take you to the "Sorry.." page.  Instantly.  I redeemed 16 codes and every single one instantly took me to the "Sorry" page.  No more deliberation – just an instant loser.  What happened to the Sunday smorgasbord?

Contact to the contest administrators Young America early Saturday morning regarding this malfunction, was not returned.

This is How the Contest Ended – Not With a Bang, But Eerie Silence

Players (including myself) tried redeeming points periodically throughout Sunday, in a vain attempt to check whether the contest had resumed proper operation.  It never did.  Every attempt was the same – instant loser. Not once was there the web server delay of prior days before you might see a Win or Lose screen.  Everyone's an instant loser.

Pepsi Responds, Sort Of

Pepsi was contacted for comment prior to publishing this story. They were aware of a Saturday morning incident and chalked it up to "some site maintenance" on the web site.  When asked about the site "eating" points during this time, Pepsi disagreed and said that points should not have been lost. Asked whether the winning should have resumed after the maintenance was complete, Pepsi claimed that it should have. Finally, when the idea of there being zero winners this weekend was proposed, Pepsi stated "No, that does not seem accurate."  In all fairness, it didn't seem that the representative was aware that the win/lose rate had apparently taken such a dramatic fall over the weekend.

However, Pepsi said they would discuss the issue with Yahoo and get back to 5Frets.com.  We have yet to hear back but will post an update here if we get one.

Did Even a Single Person Win During What Was Supposed To Be the Biggest Day of Winners?

I could not find a single report of a winner since Saturday morning (2 AM EST), which seems awfully strange – given the rabid success of winners all summer long. I can't be 100% sure, but it seems as though the Pepsi contest ended 2 days early, and the website was changed to simply "go through the motions", without actually awarding any more DLC prizes.  Was this merely an accident resulting from the Saturday morning site maintenance?  Maybe.

There will be some who say: "They gave away a ton of free stuff, what is there to complain about?"  While I wish I was one of those who played the contest all summer long, I first found out about it Friday night when I consumed a Pepsi at an outdoors sporting event.  I redeemed my first cap late that night and instantly won a single DLC song.  The next day I collected as many Pepsi caps as possible and drank far more Pepsi than normal, in what turned out to be a vain attempt to continue my rather brief winning streak.

But my story isn't that big a deal.  I'm not upset about losing, it's a contest after all.  I'm upset about being deceived into believing that I had any chance to win Saturday and Sunday. I wouldn't have wasted my time and money buying Pepsi if I knew that 0 prizes would be awarded, compared to the 10,000+ I had expected.

It was worse for those who posted on forums, mentioning that they'd stored up hundreds of caps, hoping to unload on the Sunday smorgasbord of surplus unawarded prizes stated in the official rules.  One such forum member posted:

There go 240 codes down the drain. **** YOU PEPSI, **** YOU.

Clearly, I'm not the only one upset by this last-minute departure from the contest rules.

Conclusion

Pepsi had a great contest going on this summer, and those who played early likely don't have anything to complain about.  But for those who played the final two days expecting at least the usual 10,000 Rock Band songs to be awarded, it left us with a sour taste.

What do you think?  What could Pepsi do to make it up to contest players who feel shortchanged?

Do you know of anyone who won during Saturday or Sunday, September 12-13th? Let's hear about it.