I’m pretty easy going most of the time and it takes quite a bit to rile me, but my goat has been well and truly got this last week, so it’s time for a little opinionated rant.
Microsoft bans 1 million Xbox Live players
So to coincide with the biggest release ever (if sales figures are to be believed) of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Microsoft released an update for the 360 which bans modified consoles from its online Live gaming platform. Cue something in the region of 600K – 1M people suddenly unable to connect and play their new game online, and cue the bleeding hearts and ‘it’s unfair’ brigade. These people, these are the ones who have wound me up.
One of the main arguments and debates you’ll hear among the modding community is that once they buy the hardware (i.e. the console), it should be theirs to do what they want with. Just for the record, I’m with them 100% here. Where we differ in opinion though is that this shouldn’t affect our ability to play online with them. Live is a proprietary service, a paid-for one at that, and as such is bound by its own terms and conditions, which every single user agrees to. If you don’t like it, tough, don’t play. The simple fact of the matter which I am certain applies to 99.9% of those banned, is that they modified their console in order to play pirated games.
From here we move on to the other arguments, about how modding their consoles isn’t about piracy, it’s about ‘hobbyist’ actions, such as ‘homebrew’ development, media playing and suchlike. Then there’s the other main camp, who claim that they do it to make backups of their own discs which are ‘oh so easily scratched’, so that they don’t have to pay for another copy. Let’s have a look at these arguments for a second.
- I want to develop my own software, to be part of the homebrew scene.
If any Xbox 360 user wants to have a go at developing games for the console, there’s a simple and official way. Use of the XNA developer tools and membership to the XNA Creators Club. XNA is the official, Microsoft supported development environment, and while membership costs $99/year to develop and publish games this is still a) cheaper than some mods, and b) the creator gets 70% of the revenue every time their game is bought. For anyone serious enough to develop 360 software, there’s no real reason to choose the modding route over the official, supported one.
The part I mentioned about media, being able to play or stream different media types, that’s pretty much defunct now too. Xbox 360 natively supports video streaming and playback of the most popular formats, namely the Xvid and Divx codecs supported in the avi container.
- I want to make backups of my discs in case they get scratched.
Sorry, call me cynical, but I’m not buying this one either. If you’re willing to spend £40 on a game, look after it. I’m pretty good (but not great) at making sure my games always go back in their boxes or some kind of holder, and I can honestly say I’ve never scratched a disc so far as to make it unreadable. We’re talking about (quick count-up here) at least 7 different consoles and literally hundreds of discs (yes, I’m that sad). Even if I was the kind of person who likes nothing more than to store his games in boxes of sand, gravel and broken bottles, it’s not like I’ve got no options. Most video stores and independent games shops have disc fixing services which normally cost a few quid a time. Compare that to the cost of a mod and a stack of DVDs. For the number of times you’d actually need to resort to getting a disc fixed or using a backup, there’s no way you can justify the difference in cost.
While something like a million subscribers is a large number to ban (although that loses some of its significance when you consider they have over 20M subscribers), the fact remains that over 99% of these people modded their console – and therefore broke the user agreement – for the sole purpose of playing pirated games. There are some absolute h0wlers of stories on the internet now, including people saying ‘it felt like someone just told me my dog had died’, and that they just can’t afford to buy the games. Tough, that’s life. If you can’t afford the games, don’t spend ~£200 on a console, £40/year subscription fees and £40-£80 on a modification.
The only people I feel sorry for are people buying second-hand consoles now who have no idea that it has either already been banned, or will as soon as they try to sign in. Whether Microsoft have planned any kind of contingency for this I have no idea, but it’s a pain in the ass and no mistake.
This article was the final straw which forced me to write this today. If you read it you’ll see pretty much every point I’ve mentioned here covered. As for this…
Modded consoles also open up the Xbox 360 to the homebrew community, with gangs of bedroom designers the world over teaming up to try their hands at game making. This is often a well of creativity and a great entry point for designers with untapped talent. It’s easy to forget that massively popular games like Counter Strike started life as software mods themselves.
Yeah, except Counter-Strike was a mod made with officially released tools, much like the XNA kit. Half-Life wasn’t hacked in order to create it, in fact the people hacking tend to be the people cheating, and anyone who’s had to play online with cheats will tell you just how incredibly annoying it is. It’s probably a close second to reading opinionated drivel like this blog update ;).
If people want to download games that’s up to them, I’ll not pretend I never have in the past, but if you fall foul because of it, don’t cry and whinge about how unfair it is. Thanks for sitting through my cathartic venting folks.