Xbox 360 Game Piracy Spreading In China

simoniker writes "Xbox 360 game piracy appears to be spreading notably in China, with at least one Shanghai-based vendor offering Xbox 360 titles such as Hitman: Blood Money for around 30 Chinese yuan ($3.50). This comes after hackers managed to flash changes to the BIOS on the Xbox 360's Optical Disc Drive earlier this year, which allowed non-authenticated (copied) games to be played. Microsoft's John Porcaro commented at the time: 'The core security system has not been broken. However, on some Xbox 360 consoles the authentication protocol between the optical disc drive and the console may be attacked.'"

Comments

I might consider buying one now

[Opportunist]

Look around and realize, a lot of people buy consoles based on whether or not they can pirate the games for it. Look for the successful consoles and then check whether or not it was "easy" to pirate for it. Then check sales numbers and the advent of cracking tools, modchips and patched firmware, you just MIGHT see a pattern...

Re:I might consider buying one now

[brouski]

Look around and realize, a lot of people buy consoles based on whether or not they can pirate the games for it. Look for the successful consoles and then check whether or not it was "easy" to pirate for it. Then check sales numbers and the advent of cracking tools, modchips and patched firmware, you just MIGHT see a pattern...

You have a chicken or egg dilemma.

How much time and effort goes into cracking a console the first time? How much time refining it into a consumer-level solution? Isn't it equally possible that high sales lead to the top-shelf cracking efforts, and not the other way around?

Re:$3.50???

[tritium6]

I'm willing to bet you've never been to China. The lowest rate I was able to find for a room in Shenzen (just across from Hong Kong on the mainland side) at a decent hotel was about $60 per night. You can get a hostel in Hong Kong for $20 per night, but thats a hostel, not a "high end hotel suite". The nouveau riche in China are creating a market for those types of luxuries, and the luxuries are priced with the knowledge of the people who buy them. I've lived in that part of the world and the way it works with luxuries is, if people will buy it, it is quite expensive; if nobody will buy it, it isn't available for purchase. It does not tend to be the case that luxury goods are available for cheap. What you get really cheap is labor, and labor intensive goods and services.

Re:Do What Sony Did

[powerlord]

This does two things, it keeps people from mucking with the PS3's internal hardware and its pretty much kills any possible demand for pirated PS3 games, or at least minimizes it.

It does one other thing: It removes a legal reason for Chip Modders to make chips. This may let them go after chip modders more aggresively, since they can claim that the only reason for a mod chip is to play pirated content.

way to sugar coat the issue

[matt328]

The core security system has not been broken.

This core security system doesn't seem to do much if one can play pirated games without breaking it.

Re:way to sugar coat the issue

[Danse]

It still won't let you run unsigned code, so actually it does do quite a bit.

Maybe, but who cares that you can't make it run Linux? You can download games and actually play them now. That's good enough for 98% of the people who would be interested in this development.

Re:Piracy: The New Marketing Tool!

[EPDM]

---snip---
Hmmm, one poster jokes that cracked 360 games might actually help Xbox 360 marketshare in China and Taiwan. It's a just a joke now, but what if this actually turned out to be the case?
---/snip---

What made the Windows PC so popular? Guess?

Re:Except, Xbox360 not profitable

[Mitaphane]

It's pretty simple. They lose money on selling individual game console boxes (the system, a controller, wires, whatever is packed with it) so that the entry cost doesn't seem that high to the consumer. However, they make a huge amount of money off of seperately packaged controllers, memory cards (example: Sony's PS2 memory card still costs ~$25 for 8MB even though 8MB of flash memory costs next to nothing these days), extra AV wires (huge markup, it cost only a few dollars to make a $25 AV cable), and of course their bread and butter game licensing. Not to mention the XBox Live service is probably making a good amount of money with subscriptions and downloads.

Also keep in mind that MS (and Sony), unlike the gaming companies of old, has many different divisions in their company. Thus, the hugely profitable MS Office division can subsidize the XBox division until they've gained enough marketshare to be in the black.