Microsoft No Apologies for Xbox Live Bans

this 1 million figure came from some US MS rep at customer care that apparently told a customer they are aiming for 1,000,000 bans by christmas week, so very unconfirmed, also doesnt this through some suspect into the actual figures of Xbox 360`s sold to date!, so lets say 1mil consoles are banned and 50% go buy another to flash with the latest MS stealing firmware that will surly be released, then doesnt that 500,000 consoles sold become yes sold xboxs but not new users, not to mention previous banning waves doing this how many actual xbox`s are in indivual users hands how many homes have xboxs?

I guess that seems fair enough, as the banned people are probably unapologetic about downloading games, and then still being able to do so despite being banned so some people wouldn't be too bothered, i mean hey, the original xbox, ps2 or gamecube didn't have achievements to become addicted to, neither did the wave prior. Don't get me wrong, I don't agree with piracy, because there are some decent games out there that deserve our dosh, such as Brutal Legend, top game and not just a rehash of another game they've made. Unlike the GH series, which takes the same guts from every other game in the chain, adds a few minor changes, gives it new but still similar and simple graphics, and expects us to dosh out the same £40/50 we did for the last one, despite it having about 50% of the same stuff. You'd think that the solus editions should be about £25/30 at most. Same could also be said for NFS, with Most Wanted/Carbon/Underground all being exact copies almost. Minor changes don't justify high prices and only push people into piracy. But I could be wrong, I guess I just think screw that to the games I believe do that and take a walk down to blockbuster or check out lovefilm.com, as rental just seems like a better option these days for the best part. Try a game, get the gamerscore and then buy it if it's good, obviously waiting till the price inevitably drops after several weeks after launch to around half the original asking price.

Well done to MS is what I say. Us game developers work seriously hard to make games and it can be devastating to see people think it's alright to just take the product of our work for nothing.

When a video game company closes because it can't get enough sales, people lose their jobs. These are real people, often with families and mortgages, who find themselves out of work. How do you think it feels to know that's partly because some people think it's ok to play our games without paying for them?

Sometimes I hate gamers.

@ghoti Your post is interesting though i do not openly fling the fact im also a Games Designer about to make a point. I can understand piracy is an issue, yet it is an issue as a result to poor hardware design and implementation flaws. Take the PS3, WII and PSP for example. They have also simply bypassed piracy by taking care in their hardware designs and making each update completely firmware dependant. Microsoft on the other hand simply took a low budget pc system and slapped a custom case on it meaning that each part is still independant allowing easy security bypassing.
In fairness i hold microsoft responsible for allowing such easy loopholes for any person too bypass.

Also i dont think pirates have anything to do with losses. Poor designs, lack of care for their intended consumers (like you put in your reply) and the incredible flood of repetitive sequals which in all fairness even i would not want to buy for the 5th time!

Oh and the recession is also to blame for lack of jobs and people pirating. Specialy when Activision think in this time people will pay £60+ for a normaly £40 game!

@ghoti

But that depends purely on what games you make to be fair. Yeah, everyone works, everyone has lives and possibly families, and everyone should be paid for the work they do, but I wouldn't pay for a meal from a restaurant known for serving cold dishes and worse than McD's quality food, in the same way that I wouldn't buy a game if it's just another remake with a different name or one of the many Wii "party games".

So if you think you deserve to be paid for the work you do, evaluate whether you're making games worth what the price tag is asking for, or if it's just the company trying to milk the cash cow, because if it's just the latter, maybe you should think about moving on to a different company? All the people who work in video-games seem talented, I don't disagree, and more often than not the company's have the final say on what games are made, but if they're just doing it for profit instead of quality, you're gambling on whether you'll have a job in a year's time, maybe more, maybe less, because then it all comes down to the public, and whether the game will be a success with the majority, such as CallOfDuty, Guitar Hero, etc. etc. unlike games such as Heavy Rain that push quality in the hopes to then get back as much as they put in from the people who purchase it. So at the end of the day, it's the people at the top of these companies who are to blame, they chose the path to lead the company down, not the gamers, and if it's a bad path resulting in bad games, people won't buy them, let alone pirate them.

@Matthew_O'Donnell

Hi Matthew,

Are you actually blamiong MS for piracy of xbox games because they've not made it impossible to pirate them?

I think the problem is that people think they are entitled to play games without buying them.

Cheers,
ghoti

@ghoti Nah im holding microsoft partialy to blame due to how EASY they made it. Also how is renting any different to pirating? Either way you dont buy the game and both in most cases are 'try before you buy' in theory.
All is needed is a key based system linked to gamerprofiles that is printed on back of manuals in order to unlock acheivments for the game. Isnt hard and that took less than 4 secs to think up while typing. Game industry is like a child who screams when he gets a tiny cut when the kid next to him has a broken leg and happily walks home without a word.

It's funny to think that Microsoft are banning consoles, so anyone who has pirated or modified then has to go out and purchase another console for a minimum of £100. So Microsoft is taking a hard stance on piracy on behalf of developers and publishers, but making a tidy profit on behalf of themselves. Makes you wonder whether Microsoft really cares for developers and publishers.

@discordia1337

Maybe you should suggest to Microsoft that half of the money from sales of the next million 360's should be split up amongst all the developers who've released games on it? ;)

Personally, I'm not against modding in principal, we have paid for the physical item after all, as long as it doesn't enable piracy. My Wii, for example, has Homebrew Channel on it; I occassionally do mess around with some of the homebrew games, but it's mainly on there so that I can play imported games. The vast majority of the Wii homebrew development community is anti-piracy, yet, when they attempted to open a dialogue with Nintendo, all they got for their efforts were legal threats in return. Maybe some developers should talk to Nintendo, try to point out that legitimising certain aspects of the homebrew scene would actually make things easier and mean they could focus their efforts on the piracy problem specifically.

That is Terrible for Xbox fans around the world




[18 Nov 2009, 14:39: Message edited by 'TimSpong'] Spam deletion