Microsoft is cleaning house by banning every account that looks or even smells shady. This could be the reaction to the recent rise in piracy on the Xbox 360. Apparently, not only is Microsoft banning Xbox Live accounts, but also the physical Xbox 360, permanently.Fallout 3 and Gears of War 2 are prime examples of recent big titles that hit the BitTorrent sites way before the actual release dates. Gears of War 2 is an EPIC Games owned IP but is a Microsoft published first party title. So you can imagine how mad the execs over at Microsoft were when they found out thousands of people were downloading Gears of War 2 for free from the web.
Currently, the Xbox 360 is the easiest next gen console to pirate on. However, with the New Xbox Experience (NXE) dashboard remake, Microsoft wants to start fresh with a new image. It seems this entails banning waves of Xbox Live accounts that seems suspicious.
On the official Xbox forum and Xbox-Scene forum, users are complaining that their accounts have been banned without just cause. However, some users are admitting their shady practice of pirating games. It is all fine and dandy to ban modders and game pirates, but if innocent bystanders were banned as collateral damage then that could be a big problem for paying Xbox Live subscribers.
Another problem gamers have to worry about is buying used Xbox 360s from Ebay. Once an Xbox 360 is banned it is permanently disabled from connecting to Xbox Live. I am sure there will be an influx of used Xbox 360s going up on eBay right now.
It is said that Piracy killed gaming on the PC and the PSP faces similar problems with hardware selling disproportionately to software. Currently the Xbox 360 has the highest next generation software attach rate, but if piracy becomes widespread, it could be detrimental to the attach rate of the Xbox 360.
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