Foxx Thoughts

Microsoft recently announced that it will be cutting access to their online servers to up to 1,000,000 x-box live subscribers. These subscribers have been chosen to lose their service based on the fact that they modified their x-box 360 in some manner. Most of these modifications were to the DVD-ROM drive to allow “backed up” (at least that’s what the modifier will tell you, majority of the time its pirated games) to be played on the 360 console. The other modifications were mainly modifications to the hard drives because people either wanted/needed more storage space then Microsoft currently supplies, or, They were not willing to pay what Microsoft is attempting to charge (on average $1.00/Gb compared to $.10/Gb for standard hard drives).

As far as I feel about it, I paid for this system (I don’t own a 360, but if I did) so I should be able to modify it to be able to do what I want. If the storage is insufficient, or I want to run a different operating system on the said hardware, I should be able to do that. I understand the pirating issue and hate that they feel this is the only way they can really crack down on pirating, but I do feel that at $60 a game, I should be able to take measurements to preserve my disc. If Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo would replace my disc when it becomes unreadable, I would be more then happy to have every system banned (maybe even remotely deactivated) that modified the ROM drive.  What’s killing me are the comments of people to these reports. Majority of them are saying that this is just a ploy by Microsoft to get people out shopping again to replace their banned X-box during holiday season sales or that if the games didn’t cost so much, they wouldn’t have to pirate. My favorite one of all was this one person (he used a guest account so I cant directly credit him, and I do not recall which site I was reading this on so I cant point you their either, but) claimed that he pirated games because he wanted to test them to make sure he didn’t buy a game he didn’t like. I believe that’s why there’s this whole rental system out there. You pay way less then you would for the game yet you still have a chance to play it all the way through. These claims are outrageous at best, this is just simply (and I can’t believe I’m siding with Microsoft but…) Microsoft doing their job by enforcing their rules.

The main point brought about with the modification of the consoles is that they do not want anyone to have an unfair advantage. I never quite understood this from Microsoft’s perspective because they are also in the PC world, where in, lets say World of Warcraft, the person running a pc with 4 gigabytes of RAM and a 3 gigabyte dual core processor with a 10 Mbps connection is always going to win the fight against an equally talented opponent with 2 gigabytes of RAM and a 2 gigabyte single core processor with a 6Mbps connection. The second person can be just as talented with his character or, even better, but because he did not spend as much money as his opponent on hardware for his “console” that person is at a disadvantage. Until I hear Microsoft complain on this side of the field, I just simply can not accept their argument on fair play.