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Console Makers Pushing For More Network Reliance
There's a story on Joystiq about the convergence of games consoles and network play, suggesting that the industry is slowly moving away from physical media, preferring the control and simplicity of online distribution. The article points out that Microsoft's Games for Windows Live, despite being relatively unpopular, has seen continued development with an eye toward interacting with Xbox Live. Quoting:
"While it's unlikely that the next generation of consoles will completely forgo disc-based media, downloads are quickly becoming a much bigger part of the experience. Some games, such as Rock Band 2 and Gears of War 2, are now shipping with codes for free downloads. This isn't because the publishers like you and want to give you free stuff. It's part of a larger strategy to increase the importance of the online presence, where content can be tightly controlled and decrease the importance of physical media, and thus, used-game sales and rentals."
I agree with everything you've said, but I have a slight pedantic nitpick.
Nintendo of America was the only one to produce cartridges for the North American market (not counting unlicensed games). In Japan, several development houses made their own cartridges, and the Famicom Disk System required only a special floppy drive to publish games. NoA adopted this business strategy because they wanted control over what cartridges were published while still encouraging third-party development houses. They felt that uncontrolled development and publication of sub-par third-party games was a major cause of the Video Game Crash of 1983, and wanted to avoid having a second video game crash.
This hit Konami hard - Nintendo of America's guidelines were to only allow five releases per developer in a calendar year, so in order to publish all of the games that they wanted to market in America, they had to start up an American subsidiary called Ultra Games.
It has long been the dream of the media studios to kill the secondary (used) market for media (music, movies, software, etc.). Now they've finally stumbled upon the perfect solution (ironic that they actually *fought* the idea tooth-and-nail back in the Napster days).
A sad thing for me, too. I buy most of my console games used at a huge discount online. All you have to do is wait a few months after release and you can get most used games for a fraction of their retail price.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You seem to be very confused about how cracking the 360 works.
The way the anti-piracy works is that they burn the game dvd's in a way that can't be done by a home burner and then they tell the dvd drive in the xbox to check for those signs of it being burned by a real burner.
The crackers get past this by installing new custom firmware on the dvd reader that tells the console that the dvd was industrially burned regardless if it is or not.
The reason some people get banned from live is that the live server sometimes asks questions regarding the data on the dvd and badly made copies sometimes have missing/bad data.
The new firmware you speak off isn't actually new firmware, it's a new dvd drive all together that apparently uses millitary technology to make the firmware tamper proof, the current work around is to just install another dvd reader and I suspect the anti-tamper itself will be cracked eventually.
The game console itself is never involved in this piracy war,, it's all waged in the dvd firmware.