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

You know what this means?

[jandrese]

This means the 360 might start picking up popularity in Asia, especially in China and Taiwan.

Re:You know what this means?

[Frizzle Fry]

Where is this mall with the dollar Pauly Shore movies?

Ruled by the market?

[Rob T Firefly]

Hitman: Blood Money for around 30 Chinese yuan ($3.50).

That's about what I'd pay for that game.

Hmm.

[Future Man 3000]

"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."

Cheers for the core security system! Jeers for the authentication protocol!

Piracy: The New Marketing Tool!

[blueZhift]

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?

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:Piracy? No, Just Their True Market Value

[toolie]

I'm pretty sure it was modded 'flamebait' because 'dumbass' still isn't an option.

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:way to sugar coat the issue

[IamTheRealMike]

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.

Re:Except, Xbox360 not profitable

[Blakey Rat]

Just FYI, the loss of the Xbox Division isn't a management problem because it's expected and has been planned for. Go back to when Microsoft was first planning the console, and they talked about how they weren't expecting to make a profit the entire first generation and possibly not the second.

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:I might consider buying one now

[Mitaphane]

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.

Re:Except, Xbox360 not profitable

[Mitaphane]

The idea has so much traction because it's true. From the link:

An up-close look at the components and other materials used in the high-end version of the Xbox 360, which contains a hard drive, found that the materials inside the unit cost Microsoft $470 before assembly. The console sells at retail for $399, meaning a loss of $71 per unit -- and that is just the start.

Other items packaged with the console -- including the power supply, cables, and controllers -- add another $55 to Microsoft's cost, pushing the loss per unit to $126. These estimates include assumptions that Microsoft is getting a discount on many components.

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.