They do these bans yearly....
1 Million Xbox 360s to be Banned
- Thread starter Acert93
- Start date
They do these bans yearly....
$30 ? I saw a guy trade in Left 4 dead 2 for $20 bucks at gamestop. I gave the guy 20 and took it home. Gamestop was going to sell it for $55. They make a nice $35 cut and now the developer is competing against a game a week old that is selling for $5 bucks less than their brand new copy.
I think The developers would love to be able to go DD only . Sure they'd loose out on collectors editions but i'm sure they would recoupd that in sales lost to gamestop and piracy. They coudl still put out the cards + gimick art books and other items in a package at retail stores.
In 2011/12 when a new xbox drive comes out a 1TB drive will most likely hit rock bottom at $30 bucks. Even if a bluray drive is $15 they would still only pay $15 more if they exclude that. Its also one less piece of the kit that can die .
It could do but I doubt it two reasons
A/ ok u have the games (true some will be pirated)/mates on live/perpherials etc. getting a ps3/wii is effectively starting from scratch.
B/ a recent survey (see gamasutra) showed a high percentage of xbox360 owners who's consoles had failed multiple times, still were willing to purchase a new console, personally I thought the data was shocking (no doubt #A I made helps)
I always thought it was bad, but I'll admit even I was surprised by how bad it really was when I finally saw the data. It definitely affects future publisher decisions as well. For example, I was shown a sequel to a known PC game. I got to play it, it was about 90% complete. It still needed polish, tweaking and qa, but it was mostly done. Seemed fun as well. But they had no interest in publishing it. Why? Because it was PC only, and therefore it would lose them money to complete and ship it. Instead, they asked developer 'x' to deliver a console version as well otherwise it wouldn't see the light of day, at least not from this publisher.
It's quite shocking to see PC gaming having come to this, and honestly it's quite sad especially for us old school gamers that have played on PC going back to the 80s'. But that's where it's at.
I think that's ridiculous.
The 360 console is not a moneymaker for MS. Selling additional consoles which don't make them any money -- or worse, cause them to lose money -- doesn't help them in any way at all. It's just fodder for fanboys who...enjoy...the NPD sales numbers.
They banned the consoles because they pirate. It doesn't generate them any money. But to say it's related to generating sales numbers is just absurd.
Not to mention that it's just as likely these people huff and puff and jump ship to the $299 PS3, which hasn't banned anyone.
It seems to be resting on Blizzard's shoulders only for the foreseeable future. Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 will no doubt sell like crazy and without Battle.net they're not as much fun. It'll be really interesting to see how well their games sell, or if they cannibalize players from WoW.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
MS has already started seeding this. And has already started to get retailers used to the concept. Except instead of DD codes, it's Point cards. But basically the same concept you spend cash in a retail store for games that you want to buy through digital distribution.
Sony will have to move to something similar if they also plan to do digital distribution in the future. Otherwise, it'll be hard to convince retailers to carry your console without giving them a really fat margin on a piece of hardware that's usually sold with razor thin margins.
Regards,
SB
Check any torrent site or tracker. One can see how many people are sharing/downloading any given file, actually even the number of total downloads for any given torrent as well.
Checking all torrent sites and trying to add up these numbers probably doesn't get you near the total number of pirated copies though. There are privately run FTP servers and such stuff around the world as well, that won't show up on torrent sites.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Dragon Age Online could have been one of those also, but apparently the New Box free DLCs appear to be easier to pirate than expected. Thus removing much of the incentive for piraters to buy the boxed version.
Unfortunately Bioware was in a no win situation here. If you mandate always requiring an internet connection for the DLC (ONLY way to prevent it from being pirated) then you get blasted by PC users on forums.
If you don't mandate always requiring an internet connection for the DLC, then it gets pirated out the wazoo. Personally I think it was a mistake to have caved and allowed offline DLC if they wanted to prevent rampant piracy of the game.
Blizzard on the other hand is biting the bullet and just saying, tough, you'll always require internet validation if you want to play this online. They'll get a lot of flak for it in forums, but I'm willing to bet the gains from discouraged piracy will far outweigh people that don't buy the game due to it.
It has to be discouraging for a publisher/dev to go to individual "private" trackers and see hundred of thousands of snatches of titles that when added together add up to multiple millions of lost sales. BTW - before people mention crappy games. If you go to any private tracker, people will comment whether a game is crappy or not and those games will have snatches in the low hundreds, possibly a few thousand at most.
Dunno, in the PC landscape right now, it's damned if you do, damned if you don't. Example - look at the hubbub over no-dedicated servers for some upcoming games (another way to circumvent online validation is through hacked dedicated servers).
Back to consoles, though...
Consoles on the other hand are far less affected. At least X360. As Live multiplayer requires always on validation. Right now, it's a cat and mouse game between MS and firmware hackers. 1 million consoles aren't all the hacked consoles, it's just all the hacked consoles MS has detected thus far.
MS appears to be increasing the frequency at which it attempts to discover modded consoles by more frequently releasing new "waves" of discs. They fairly recently released Wave 4 discs which coincides with the current banning wave. And it took a month or two for a new firmware to be released to stealth firmware hacks once again. Wave 3 was released last year around this time with the NXE dash update.
I'm willing to be most of the people banned were people that foolishly used forced wave 4 games to run on the then current firmwares that didn't yet have support for wave 4.
Anyways, even with that. Piracy on X360 is still a drop in the bucket compared to piracy on the PC. However, even though it's a drop in the bucket, I wouldn't be surprised if for some titles piracy approached a 50/50 with purchased/pirated games.
Regards,
SB
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Yes, online fileshareing sites like rapidshare, megaupload, etc. appear to be increasing in popularity for spreading of pirated files. USENET also remains popular for spreading pirated files. And those can't be easily tracked for number of downloads.
Regards,
SB
Just because someone downloaded a pirated copy of anything doesn't automatically mean that he would have purchased it, had the warez version not been available.
Those who keep doing this run through games within days, watch movies only once and so on. If there was no other way but to buy stuff, they'd do as others do and try to make the most out of every purchase. So they'd go through far, far less games and movies and such, which means you can not count every download as a lost sale.
And it's obviously easier to do on a PC, which is why people like these tend to flock to that platform.
Those who keep doing this run through games within days, watch movies only once and so on. If there was no other way but to buy stuff, they'd do as others do and try to make the most out of every purchase. So they'd go through far, far less games and movies and such, which means you can not count every download as a lost sale.
And it's obviously easier to do on a PC, which is why people like these tend to flock to that platform.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Probably the reason why MS is also banning accounts on Live now also. So it's not as simple as just getting another console if someone wanted to keep their friendslist, name, gamer points, purchased DLC/games/movies (although if you are pirating you probably aren't buying stuff through Live), etc... All gone...
Regards,
SB
Silent_Buddha
Legend
I'm not sure if account bans are universal (IE - all banned consoles = banned account) or it's a game by game decision. But I do know that accounts are being banned on Live.
However, I would imagine account bans would be game by game, as accounts aren't tied to consoles.
Regards,
SB
However, I would imagine account bans would be game by game, as accounts aren't tied to consoles.
Regards,
SB
Exactly.
The real PITA about what MS did was in addition to banning the console from XBox Live, they prevent installation of games to the hard drive, prevent the use of Media Center Integration, and flag the user profile as corrupt to prevent people from obtaining achievements using pirated games. However, one can still easily play single player games on the banned console.
The ban hit those who have never played any WAVE4 games. They even hit those who had modded consoles but never played any pirated games.
Not true. Many have had modified consoles for well over 2 years without ever being banned before this current wave.
specwarGP2
Regular
That's true... but the margin will have to be substantial if games are to be download only and gamestop never gets a cut of those sales. Supposedly there's a $50 built in margin for PSP go to make up for lost revenue on games. Gamestop would surely demand a bigger margin from a console which would put it at a price disadvantage against the competition.
Ok so maybe a BD drive will cost $20-$40. That's still going to be less than the cut gamestop will demand to sell any download only console. Sure publishers would love a DD only console but its not their job to actually get them installed and that's where the problem is when it comes to gamestop. Also for DD to take off all the console mfgrs need to be on board at the same time but I highly doubt Sony will abandon BD for PS4.
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