Ballmer withdraws Australia statement

Following on from last week’s news that Microsoft might consider withdrawing the Xbox for the Australian market, the firm has made a retraction of the comments.

MS executive Steve Ballmer hinted that the sale of the machine might not be viable in Australia following the acquittal of a Sydney man in a mod-chip case. Although the accused had a substantial amount of copied games in his home, the fact that he was installing mod-chips for others was thrown out of court as the Australian Consumers’ Association argued that this enabled players to play games from other regions and was beneficial.

Ballmer commented that as the console business model for the console industry is software dependent, the undermining of that business model might make it difficult to continue trading in Australia.

Today Microsoft said that far from issuing an ultimatum to the Australian government, Ballmer was merely making a generic comment about the industry.