Reading yesterday's posts in here, another GAFfer got banned, yet it still doesn't seem like a common thing. No one else on the Xbox Support forums has even specifically stated that they might have gotten banned for these games aside from me (still no response BTW) so there's no certainty that the marketplace charge was about the games or something else. There are even people out there that are even still playing these very games just fine. And up till now there still hasn't been any single sort of word about it on Microsoft's end.
Important to note that the person banned yesterday was probably banned over a week ago but had not connected to live in that time.
A lot of people have put 2 + 2 together to decide that the banning was directly caused by getting the free games and this seems to have been a common assumption on other forums as well but the simple answer is we dont know.
Either Microsoft picked some people at random for this and banned them
Or they used this as part of the reason and went after people who had done something else in the past which they classed as a minor infringement (in which case if you did this now thats probably a black mark against you and if you do something minor in the future you risk everything)
Or there was some other reason for the bans
I would much rather Microsoft came out to say what actually happened and what the punishment was because otherwise how can I trust that they will be straight with people in the future.
Before all the announcements If you asked me what i would be getting for the next generation i'd have said Xbox
After the announcements I had pretty much decided Sony
After all the 180's that Microsoft had pulled I was undecided but this type of thing happening with no recourse really pushes me away from Microsoft because for all I know I have a black mark against my account and if something else happens i could lose it and my 'brand new' console