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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.'"
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? And then what if it spread to Korea and Japan? Much has been written about the effect of piracy on console and software sales, some of it implying that piracy helps more than hurts. So with the next generation of console wars promising to be closer than ever, will any of the desperate combatants be tempted to leave the lights on and the backdoor cracked open a bit? No one would publicly admit to this, but it does make one wonder... Right now Sony seems to be doing backflips to keep homebrew and pirated games off of the PSP. But in a tight war with Microsoft and Nintendo, will they be tempted to lighten up a bit on the PS3?
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I have better, more accurate, proposition. Games that very popular, or good, tend to be pirated more. Consoles that have a lot of good games tend to be very popular. Piracy and popularity might be slightly corelated but one doesn't neccesarily causes the other. This is coming from someone who has purchased an XBox for the sole purpose of modchipping it for emulators and XBox Media Center and also owns a PS2 with an installed hard drive that game images run off of. The XBox is much easier to pirate games for in my experience than the PS2. Yet, the PS2 has about 3 times the number of consoles as the XBox.
-Shawn "If the Name Don't Rhyme It Ain't Mine" Conn
You missed the point of the security system - it's to stop game developers bypassing the Microsoft licensing fees. If you have to pay MS to write games for the XBox then their business model of subsidising the hardware works. If you can avoid it, then XBox is a financially losing proposition.