Microsoft has come down hard on some pirates this Halloween. No, not the slutty girls in short skirts and low cut pirate blouses or the guys dressed up like Johnny Depp, silly. Gosh, why would you think that unless you constantly think in really bad puns, in which case you lead a terrible life. No, for the past week Microsoft has been banning "a small percentage" of Xbox Live users that had systems that were modded to play pirated games. IGN uncovered the deed after seeing a bit of complaining going on in the Xbox Live forums.
After being contacted, Microsoft had this to say on the rash of complaints, "We have taken action against a small percentage of consoles that have been modified to play pirated game discs. In line with our commitment to combat piracy and support safer and more secure gameplay for the more than 20 million members of our Xbox LIVE community, we are suspending these modded consoles from Xbox LIVE."
I mean, good for Microsoft. Don't steal games. Lesson learned. Anyone here banned for their dubious activities?
[Via Hot Blooded Gaming]
Matthew Razak is Destructoid's Associate editor and co-founder of film site
Flixist. He began as community member "cowzilla" and was since sequestered to write brainy features material. He lives in Los Angeles with his beautiful wife.
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Contest:
9:00 PM on 10.31.2009
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Also, people who got banned lost the ability to install games to hdd, or at least a lot of them do. Should make for a nice end-of-year sales boost for MS though, or for Sony ;)
If you don't go online EVER with a hacked box, then what's the difference of that compared to being banned?
The instant the Xbox is modified, it's breaking the ToS the user agreed to when they bought the system. Microsoft are within their rights to block consoles.
As for fixing the console yourself, yes, that sucks, but this is a case of the majority ruining it for the minority.
i wonder if the psn will ban me because i repaired my bluray laser myself for half the price they wanted to charge me. just you wait sony, once the ps3 is cracked i'll be fucking you too with no vaseline.
Ya technically MS still owns the console so you can't do whatever you want to it.
Yeah, I mean a huge increase in 360 sales right before the Halo 3 launch? Talk about suspicious!
Well I do know some people arrogant/stupid enough to have sent in their modified 360s for repair to Microsoft. The guys I knew didn't get banned at the time (this was quite a while ageo) but MS might have smartened up and started having a closer look at consoles being sent in for repair.
Is it just because they get games before street date? If so that blows because a ton of people have connections to get games before their official release.
I really wanna know.
if microsoft start disabling consoles they would be sued to hell and back as they could never prove that the person who made the account actually owned the console.at worst they can disable your online account,and roll back any updates they made as(improvements) they made to software on your box
based on your assumption a car compay could come an disable your car because u decide to put new rims from a different manufacture on it,they can claim though that they will not support the warranty as u made changes to the car if this is mentioned in the warranty
@exqusitor the huge increase in xbox 360 sales during halo 3 launch was due to the fact that halo 3 was the first halo game on 360 and an exclusive so many people waited to buy there 360s until the launch of halo 3 in the event that they were able to catch a price drop or a newer version of the console. you arent going to see that kinda increase with mw 2. ps3 and 360 might both have slight increases but not much. the banning right before the release of both of these games is probably more to force people to buy legit copies of two of the most popular games on the 360 or risk not being able to play multiplayer. obviously with halo 3 this directly increases their profits but with cod itd be stupid to get on the wrong side of infinity ward or people would just buy it for their ps3s.
Most people mod 360's by flashing the DVD firmware. Google 360mods for more info.
The whole "leasing the console from Microsoft" is BS. If you buy it, you own it. When my 360 died from heat failure, did my lovely landlords (xboxlords?) replace it for me? No. I had to do it myself, like an apartment tenant having to go fix the boiler down in the basement. Not only that, but I had to buy the tools to open the 360, the thermal glue for the GPU, and another fan so it wouldn't happen again.
Theoretically Microsoft may be able to detect changes in the firmware through a checksum or something, but the pirates are smart and "stealth" the firmware so it's undetectable. My guess is MS is banning people by checking achievement dates. I don't think they'd ban everyone that played a game before release, as some retailers do release games early. If they see a pattern of games being played near the release of a torrent (and since torrents get dates with their uploads, easy enough for MS to Goo...I mean, "Bing") they'll ban the person. An easy way for pirates to get around this is to set the console date somewhere in the future while offline, or set it to the default November 2005 date (MS couldn't possibly ban people for that, because if you unplug/default the system it goes to that date. I bet lots of mostly offline gamers have relatively new games with achievement dates in 2005).
I could've sworn when I took the 360 on vacation and played Ghostbusters offline all the achievements were still stamped, but I could be wrong.
Maybe, but I don't think that it matters how good their banning system becomes. With no appeal system they are assuming that they are 100% correct 100% of the time. Somehow I think they'll accidentally ban at least a few of the wrong people. Either that or they won't ban enough of the correct people.
So they ban you from Xbox Live, but you can still use your modded console to play pirated games? Isn't that only partly stopping the problem, especially for those that mostly play single player games?
While it's better than nothing, they'll only catch the dumb pirates.
Another point I can get thoroughly worked up about is the fact that xbox games in America sell for 60 dollars (45 euros) and games in England sell for 30 pounds (35 euros) while games in Holland cost 60 euros which is way too expensive especially for just about 80% of the games that came out in the last 3 months (exceptions: borderlands, dragon age origins etc.)