Yesterday, news broke that Microsoft had banned a massive amount of players from its Xbox Live service which is available on its popular Xbox 360 gaming console. According to reports, the banned players had one thing in common — they had modified their console’s hardware or firmware to carry out unauthorized activity such as installation of an alternate OS, playing out of zone media, or running pirated software.
Initially, the estimates pegged the number of banned users at 600,000. Now CNET is reporting that over 1 million players have been banned from the service. That’s a pretty incredible number as Xbox Live only has 20 million subscribers. That means that approximately 1 in 20 players has been banned, or roughly 5 percent of the service’s total population.
The ban coincided with the release of Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on Tuesday, and many are speculating that the rampant piracy of the game before its release triggered Activision to demand action from Microsoft. Pirated copies were widely floating around torrents sites over the weekend, and players with modified consoles may have taken it out for a spin ahead of release.
Banned machines are showing up on eBay and elsewhere, often without warning they are banned machines.
I am offended by every article saying pirated. You have the legal right for a backup copy. Do you know cd’s scratch very easily? I remember my commodore 64 and floppy disks they were unreliable. So I used basement boys to make legal backups.
Hmmmmm. Big Brother in action. Seems to me any notion of “licensing” the x-box or any other item should be simply ILLEGAL. Once you pay money for something, it should be yours to do with as you wish.
Can anyone give a “moral” defense of anything else? I can see not allowing modified software to join “community” games but no restrictions at all on hacked software running off line.
In many other areas of economic activity, such things are well known “illegal tying arrangements”. Why not here?
1 million is less than 5% of subscribers. No big deal… To M$.
The MS terms of service are pretty clear. They can do whatever they want. Maybe it will stop some of the impossible scores on the games. Still won’t get rid of the A’holes who setup rigged games to get better scores in ranked games.
#2:
“In many other areas of economic activity, such things are well known “illegal tying arrangements”. Why not here?”
Because we have this ridiculous federal copyright law thingy.
My friend had 2 xboxes and they were both hit with the ban hammer. Thing is, he used to pay for pretty much all his games. Suffice to say, he is now going to be buying a ps3. The thing is, people who are going to have chipped consoles, are more likely to be people who are very much into playing games on the xbox. They will be super geeky no doubt. You’ll very rarely find someone who has 100% pirated games. They usually just have 1 or 2…especially if they are hard to get, or foreign games. M$ are being very stupid with this move, and are sending their most enthusiastic gamers to Sony. Although it may be just 5% of the physical population, I’d say it is a higher percentage of their revenue stream they are sacrificing.
Lets say someone is pirating all their games and playing them on the xbox. This is not COSTING xbox anything. It is unlikely this person wouldnt have purchased the games anyway. By banning this person though, you have stopped him ever buying any other xbox product at all, along with their pirated software. The act of banning, doesnt force them to buy the software so M$ can recoup their losses (which there are none of). They are hurting themselves. My friend is also so bitter about it, he says he is not going to buy another M$ product again, so its not just Sony they are sending people to, but to apple, etc too.
…til Sony does the same thing.
Well #6, maybe the idea that they play on the servers and that software sales is the only way Xbox360 sales make money, maybe it does cost them money in the end. I’m sure the accounting department would at least try to skewer it towards that conclusion at least.
-fat_anarchy
Not geeky enough to understand the xbox live terms of service. Or geeky enough to realize that if you mod your console you should keep it off of Live.
-bobbo
AFAIK these machines aren’t bricked. They work perfectly well to play games offline. If you want to play online, follow the rules of the network.
Microsoft. Leading by punishment.
1,2,6 and everyone else who doesn’t seem to “get it”.
I personally know of someone who runs a business modifying Xboxes and selling pirated games. He has made a fortune. All cash. He was only one person in a sea of many many many doing the same thing. Given the choice, people will take the pirated games every time, end of story, it doesn’t matter that you supposedly have “a friend” who bought all his games for his modified Xbox – BS!!
You seem to ignore the fact that these Xboxes will still work and play games, they simply can’t go on Xbox live.
Anyone with any brains at all (and a second to do a little research) knows that Microsoft was eating some cost on the hardware and hoping to make it up on software licencing. Sony does the same thing, as does Nintendo. They have to, otherwise you would not be able to get the hardware so cheap. Simple!!.
The amount of piracy was absolutely out of hand!! and the game companies are not going to be around if they keep getting ripped off. EA just had to lay off 10% of their work force and the whole industry is struggling. If most of the people who pirate games had actually purchased them, the picture would be totally different, the companies would be in better financial positions… etc etc. It is taking huge efforts and finances to create the games of today and if people simply pirate the games it ain’t going to continue.
The answer is simple: if you want gaming to continue and you enjoy playing the games – BUY THEM!! they cost less that you spend on a month of I-phone sevice. If you don’t give a crap and don’t care if there is a gaming industry a few years from now… keep pirating.
Do you think it’s cheap to run a service like Xbox live?? Do you have any idea what the costs are for running something like that?? in terms of labor and hardware and bandwidth etc…??? Things aren’t free, even tho many of you think they are.
Start a open-source gaming company and see how far it gets – LOL. When people are writing real code for day after day and slaving to make something outstanding – they like to get paid.
1. The console is banned on XBOX live, not the player. The player can buy a non-modified XBOX and games and resume play.
2. Modifying a console to play pirated games requires some effort, more than most are willing to invest. This includes modifying the drive ROMs. To expect MS to support the efforts of this smaller group of people is unreasonable.
2nd: If indeed the banned consoles are the more “hard-core” gamers, then they generate higher than average bandwidth costs and resources than the average XBOX Live player. Again should MS allow unfettered access and allocate additional bandwidth to those that cheat? No.
3. If this sub-set of people would never buy the games anyway, then MS has lost nothing by banning their hacked consoles. One cannot lose future sales of people who would not buy from you anyway.
Good on MS for making the system fair for those who pay for it honestly.
Clumsy and belligerent of Microsoft, pretty much typical of their history of customer relations. I would have told Activision to jump in the lake, or at least to prove in court. Hot Rodders, X-Box Modders have so much in common – playful curiosity and a delight in naughtiness. They should be treated as another marketing opportunity, not alienated. The customer who advocates your product is not to be treated this way.
#1
How often were you making these legal backups of products that you purchased BEFORE they were available for purchase?
#6
The business model for console gaming is usually to sell the hardware at a loss and then make profit off of software. If they are not selling software then they would be losing money.
If anyone thinks Sony is doing anything different is in for a rude awakening. Do you not remember just a short time ago Sony was caught putting worms and trojans on CDs to catch people who were copying? That was a 15 dollar CD, what do you think they are going to do with pirates of more expensive properties?? Sony’s approach to piracy and copyright infringement will make MS look downright friendly. If you think you’ll be playing on Sony’s live service with modified PS3s and pirated games… think again, you’re more likely to get a visit from one of Sony’s lawyers.
sargasso: you are talking about .1% of the customers – 99.9% are simply ripping them off. Anyway this is not just about MS, this is about the companies who make the games who will not survive – as I said above.
I would not be surprised to see Sony do something similar. As game sales have fallen off. I think the game manufactures are thinking the illegal copies are affecting this to some extent. At the price of games I would not be surprised. This goes well beyond just a bootleg copy though. Microsoft stated that these counsels have been altered to defeat the DRM detections. I pity the people doing this because now their counsels are bricks and who wants them? Now how much are they saving?
whats happened is yo console has been blacklisted and lost it’s right to singe. so don’t use any storage media of people who have had their consoles banned.
all you need is a new cpu (because of the serial number efuses) and a key vault.
with time i think these banned consoles might be usable aging.
oh who am i kidding not likeley that your gonna break microsfts 2048 bit private key.
jescott418,
They are NOT bricks!!!!!!
The consoles will work fine for playing games in their living rooms. They simply can’t go on to Xbox live. Get your facts straight.
The consoles are BANNED from Xbox live.
Ain’t cloud computing wonderful? This is why I don’t use consoles and stick to PCs.
It seems to me that the solution would be to disable the modified console, but to reinstate it should the modification be reversed.
Looks like some class action attorneys are already looking at these actions by M$…
Good! I pay for all my 360 games and follow the terms of use, why should douchebags be getting a free ride by buying a heavily subsidized console (the cost of which MS reasonable expects to recover by licensing content) getting it modded and literally pirate every game they have and then using the mods to cheat coz they’re too damn pathetic to play honestly.
All they do is disadvantage the honest people who do the right thing.
Fuck’em I say.
And good luck to the whiny little crybabies mentioned by Marco who think their class action won’t get tossed out of court immediately.
Oh, and the jerks who use the “I modded it so I could back up my games coz they scratch easily” excuse SHOULDN’T TREAT THEIR GAMES LIKE CRAP!!!
I shudder when I go to some of my friend’s places and see 360 disks just sitting on tables with their undersides so scuffed and scratched from not being stored or handled properly.
“…unauthorized activity such as installation of an alternate OS, playing out of zone media, or running pirated software.”
I agree with the decision to ban those cheating or using pirated games, but even then I think the ban should be reversible.
What I don’t think is right is the whole alternate OS and out of zone media thing. If I buy a DVD in France, I expect it to work in the US. I mean, come on. French cars will work in the US. French cell phones will work (on a GSM carrier). A French GPS unit will work. But a French DVD won’t play? If it doesn’t, I’d probably consider repeatedly calling tech support for whatever product won’t play it. The fact that consumers put up with this shit is a disgrace.
The ban on alternate OSs is also unwarrented. It either shows that Microsoft really hates people that imply their product could be improved (by running more/better software), or that Microsoft fears Linux. After all, only an open source OS has any chance of being modified to run on a 360. Maybe Microsoft worries that if their gamers try Linux on a 360, they might just try it on their computer. And Microsoft wouldn’t want that.
I don’t pay too much attention to new game releases but I had to check out Call Of Duty Modern Warfare! Glad I did
its not about fearing Linux. Is about people buying a powerful computing machine, the cost of which is heavily subsidized by MS for the purpose of selling games.
And the bottom line is they really cant stop you. Once again, that ban only affects connection to Xbox live, which you couldn’t do with the alternate os anyway.
The mod community can do some neat stuff, more power to them. But have sense enought to keep your head down and the system off MS’s proprietary network.
ECA, sorry bud, but you are clueless.
10 bucks???
Open your freaking eyes for a moment and look into what it costs to make these games today. The people who work on them are not morons like you, they are highly skilled and smart people who deserve to be rewarded for their hard work. Many games today have budgets that exceed that of movies, yet you’ll pay around 15 bucks to sit through 2 hours of entertainment in a movie theatre. Games provide way way more hours of entertainment than a movie – therefore they should cost a lot more – PLUS you can sell the game as used and get something back for it.
Wow!, the stupidity is unreal. People today have absolutely no idea what things cost or what the value of something is.
Boo hoo. 1-million possible cheaters banned. So many are complaining about their rights, etc., being violated by MS… WTF? They can still use these units to pirate games, run other OSes or whatever. They just can’t be on Xbox Live. As an online Xbox 360 gamer, good riddance. This is part of keeping cheaters from running bots and hacks for cheating in game. I applaud Microsoft for keeping it real. It is one of the reasons I migrated away from PC gaming where cheating is rampant.
29,
YOU ARE IGNORANT OF THE BUSINESS.
A group of people MAKE a game..
THEN you MUST go thru a distributor..
The distributor is the one that does the SALES, and adverts and so forth.
YOU CANT distribute a game in the USA unless you have contacts, and the small company DOESNT.
EA is a distributor and maker..
Atari, is only a distributor..
Many distributors, BUY the software OUTRIGHT..pay the small firm OFF and make TOTAL profit.
when they BUY OUT a game/software they have ALL RIGHTS.. a group of 5 that spent 2 years making a game, is paid an average of $10-30K each. THATS ALL.
The distributor will make his money, WORLD WIDE, by selling 1 million copies, at $1 profit, IF he uses ONLINE distribution.
WHICH is what MS and sony are doing.
ECA YOU are the ignorant one.
Small companies are more than welcome to distribute their wares through the Live Online Marketplace service (I’ve bought several games this way and the authors get one hell of a lot more $$ in their pockets than the usual distribution system)in much the same way that iPhone app writers can make money via the iPhone app store, and independent game studios can by making their work available via the STEAM game distribution method on the PC.
No longer does ANYONE have to sign a dummy contract and lose all sales and control of their IP to a big distributor like EA or Activision, though they can do that if they wish.
Grow up and do a bit of research before posting bullshit you don’t understand.
So these Xboxes are not bricked, they still play games. Will they still work with Boxee or XBMC? Will the HD-DVD player play regular DVDs? Hmmm… I wonder what these things are going for on eBay? Might be some real bargains!