Larry Hyrb a.ka. ‘Major Nelson’, the Director of Programming for XBox Live explained Microsoft’s reason for banning users who used ‘modded‘ Xboxes from XBox Live. These Xboxes were altered to change the functionality of the Xbox to among other things play games directly from the hard drive without a game disk. Obviously this presents a problem to Microsoft who would prefer that everybody who plays a game use a legitimate disk.
Some ‘modders’ aren’t going down without a fight. At least that’s what the Abington IP law firm is hoping.
Abington’s explanation of Microsoft’s nefarious plan is as follows:
As has been reported widely in the media, tens of thousands of Xbox owners have had their modified Xbox consoles banned from Microsoft’s online gaming service Xbox Live. Although modification of Xbox consoles is *arguably* against the terms of use for Xbox/Xbox Live, Microsoft “conveniently” timed the Xbox console ban to coincide with the release of the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 game and less than two months after the release of the very popular Halo 3: ODST game. This “convenient” timing may have resulted in more Xbox Live subscription revenues for Microsoft than it would have generated had these Xbox console bans taken place at some time before the release of Halo 3: ODST and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Additionally, sales of both Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (published by Activision) and Halo 3: ODST (published by Microsoft Game Studios) would likely have been greatly diminished had the Xbox console ban occurred prior to the release of these games.
Abington seems somewhat skeptical of their own argument by use of the quotation marks around “conveniently” and the asterisks around “arguably.” The firm may believe that the unlikelihood of beating Microsoft at this game may be offset by the potential prize. At least one estimate has the number of banned Xboxes at 600,000, and others at up to one million. Considering the average cost of a game is around $50, the Nirvana figure may be at $30-50 million assuming all of these people sign up to be part of the class AND hell freezes over and they are awarded the cost of a game per person.
For their part, Microsoft put up a warning that “[a]ll consumers should know that piracy is illegal.” It will be interesting to see if modders are willing to risk admitting to this behavior in exchange for a few bucks or a coupon for a game or some other random trinket.