Modchip raids have gone too far - do something about it!

Capitalism wins.

 

Capitalism actually is about a free market. A free market automatically factors in pirates,which are a pressure group sustained by customers unsatisfied by the state of affairs and the price of the product. Without piracy there would be no such thing as budget-titles or Player's Choice etc probably.

Killing one of the two extremes of this economic system would tilt the weight too much towards the manufacturer, leading ot price fixing and undermining the free market economy of the field.

A nash equasion would show you in a brief neat table what I mean, along with the prisoner's dillema theory

 

I disagree that without piracy there would be no budget titles. If you're going to pirate a game then budget pricing ($20) would not suddenly make you buy the game when you could have it for the cost of a CD-R/DVD-R, or the few dollars you'd pay for the same game pirated.

Budget range titles are a way to extend the market to pocket money purchasers and to gain extra revenue from old software.

 

You disagree wrongly I m afraid.

Many shops that sell pirates sell them for about 10USD/Euros a Disk, or sometimes even more.

Piracy would not be sustained if there wasn't a desire in buyers to pay less for their games.

If a given game hit the 5 dollar mark after a long run of success or shelf-time, I see no reason why one wouldn't prefer it over a pirated copy, considering the durability of pressed disks versus burnt media.

Piracy is evil in most eyes, but you can't define good without Evil, can you now ?

 

We are both speculating, neither can be proven right or wrong.

However, the majority of people do not buy their pirate games from shops, at least in the main markets for consoles (USA, Europe & Japan). Game shops would be shooting themselves. They buy them for a nominal amount or download them themselves and burn them to disc.

I have also never seen console games in budget ranges that hit the $5 mark, unless perhaps they are on clearance. PC games, yes, but not consoles. $20 is clearly not an attempt to draw people back from piracy.

Sony et al can only hit back by refining firmware, modifying hardware designs and by hitting the people that sell modchips.

 

Assuming piracy would be extinct, would you like to live in a galaxy governed by the Empire?

As a curious person, I never seized to be amazed by the ingenuity of people hacking consoles in order to make them run illegitimate material. You can't deny the usefullness of knowledge, even if it is being put to "naughty use".

Many current sollutions in the field of computing on matters of data integrity and security have been found thanks to pirating techniques and modifications etc.

Piracy although bad in your view, is still a stimulus for companies to come up with new and innovative ways of blocking.

Where's the fun if your team always wins just because they have the ref on their side?

 

Obviously piracy drives companies to work harder on safeguarding hardware designs, but I'd much rather see those resources being put into new features and applications that benefit me rather than taxing a hacker to work harder.

Competition between companies is enough to drive innovation and feature-sets (look at the PSP). I don't feel I owe anything to pirates for the state of the modern games industry.

 

You sure owe them a ban on XBL hehe - checkmate

 

I don't, actually. I have no pirate XB360 games, nor have I ever played any. Nor does my DS have an R4 or similar device full of ROMs, unlike yours.

I can argue absolutely guilt free.

 

Then why mod your drive's firmware in the first place? I think the positive action of re-flashing your drive's firmware speaks louder than any defence or claims of innocence.

Whether or not my DS flash-cart, which I have received for free mind you, is currently filled with pirated material is subject to survey. Presenting assumption as fact is a weak counter-argument. Even if it was filled with pirated material (which I m not saying it is) it wouldn't change anything, since you are the one arguing entirely against piracy, not I =)

Besides, a flash-cart can have many good uses, such as running homebrew, coding, and especially ScummVM on a system like the DS. On the other hand, flashing the firmware on the 360 opens really one door: 1:1 copies AKA piracy.

PS: Are you assuming your position in this discussion out of fear of Illegality or immorality? Because if it's the former, then you have clearly been in breach of the law and thus got banned from XBL. If the latter is your concern, then flashing your firmware would and will give rise to the automatic assumption of piracy by your moral peers.

As such, supporting a politically correct position for the sake of correctness despite your actions might spell hypocricy, which although not illegal, is widely accepted as immoral =)

 

Taucias, I agree with Barc0de on this one. Since alot of stuff we owe to the pirates. And well, As I said earlier, standards are good, double standards are double good. The Vatican are against the Ppill, condoms etc. But on the other hand, they own and get money out of it, because they own quite a few factories. Who makes counterceptions. And I could go on with the vatican, but I just leave that in mind. The Danish state has finally (and sadly to some ) made a nonfucking smoking law to the Danish people (my government at the moment can go to hell anyway so screw them, those fuckers). But at the same time, they are getting tons of money from the tobacco industry, and how fuckedup is that ?

Back to the piracy vs. antipiracy. If the companies, from the start (from the start of consoles and shit) sold games, for let us say 5 dollars
. or for that matter let us say 5 Danish kroner for that matter. Then I would believe, the companies would earn more money in the long run. But they didn´t. They wanted to earn BIG money NOW, and FAST. So they put a 1000 dollars sticker on the Amiga 500 computer in Denmark long ago. And then gradually lowered it down. And
the games the same way, but first after some time (years). That is why, the pirates got wings to fly on, and copied games, faster than a rabbit can fuck. And sold them ridicously cheap. And then it started the whole shebang with cracktros, the mod culture, demo parties, the demo scene you fucking name it. Since it was the hackers and crackers that made the IT world go around back then. It wasn´t the computer programmers who did it, it was the fucking pirates who did it. Not the big ass sons of bitches companies who showed the guts. It was the pirates.


And well you can argue, that piracy is bad. But some good did come out of it. So capitalism = good. My bare white hairy ass any day of the week.

Ok all curses aside and many offences, maybe my prices from the 1970/1980´s (and 90´s) are maybe a bit wrong when it comes to the computers and the consoles. But I do hope you understand where I am heading with that.

 

The idea of trying before buying, ie Demos is something that came from the notion of "playing for free at your own home, not some demo store". This is an offspring of piracy, and Microsoft as well as other companies have embrassed demos. They are an efficient way to showcase games and their content to potential buyers.

 

I already said that I have not used the mod for piracy, which is perfectly true. I am banned from Live for using modified DVD firmware, not for playing copied games as you well know from past discussions. To reiterate to you and for the benefit of people here: My firmware was flashed after the XeLL announcement, but it turns out to be largely ineffective at booting up a real Linux environment. Perhaps another method will be discovered in the future. No one thought Microsoft would be able to detect the drives over Live, since it is a fairly simple hack and does not change the version identifier, but of course that proved to be wrong. MS let the firmware mod become fairly well documented so that people would implement it, then pulled the plug on them.

It is something of a sore point for me, since I am on a replacement machine and I can't revert the firmware if it machine dies again because my machine ID is flagged on Live and thus with Microsoft. However, it was a risk I took and it is my own fault ultimately. Microsoft were perfectly justified to implement the block to protect XB360 from piracy.

I can't say missing out on Live is a big impact really, I have found the majority of Live users to be obnoxious kids.

The legality of modifying my firmware is a grey area just as a mod chip would be in any other console, technically it is against the UA I agreed to when joining the Live service, and thus I was punished as stated in the agreement. Should shops be punished for modifying the DVD firmware? Yes. Should I be prosecuted for modifying my own? No, I do not think so.

Am I a hypocrite? No, because I do not have any pirate material for any of my consoles.

Once this XB360 snuffs it, I will probably not buy another. I will likely reflash the firmware back again to protect my machine from bricking once future games require a dashboard update, but it is a tricky process and I'm not really buying new software for the machine at present. My interest lies more in the PS2 still.

I'm probably going to buy a PS3 to replace it.

 

Considering all the nice games on the 360 recently, I d say give the 360 another chance. I know i will, although i m being sufficed to demos so far, since i can't even afford second hand titles

 

It's not that the games coming aren't exciting, the problem is that the machine is totally unreliable. Without being able to get a free replacement I'm not going to fork out all that money again until MS revise the hardware to iron out the flaws in the design.

Also I anticipate MS will drop the XB360 when the successor appears just about as quickly as they did with the XBox, considering the costs they are facing.

 

I wouldn't hold my breath for a 3rd XBOX platform, not by Microsoft and its current corporate structure anyway.

Also, considering that games are being planned and made for PS2 well into 2008 , I'd say that this generation will have to stay quite long for companies (except nintendo) to difuse their costs somewhat. I can't see a new PS or XBOX before 2011.

 

This is the type of debate that can go on forever because it just isn't a black and white issue. Both sides have some legitimate points in their respective arguments. They also both have areas in said arguments where they clearly come up short. The fact that it is also a regional issue tends to complicate matters even more.

One thing which I do feel certain about is that all sides are hypocritical in one way or another.

 

I agree: after moore's departure and bach's stock dumping it seems that the X360 (and the whole Xbox division) is not considered a profitable project or even a good one at all anymore.

I think that if the X360 doesnt snatch's a big chunk of the PS2/3 market (and therefore ends with a market share similar to its predecessor's) microsoft will pull the plug in the entire division, and stick to software like SEGA did.

I see the new PS3 DVR as a BIG menace to the X360 since sony could in the near future sell the console for next to nothing (or just give it away for free) with the cable/sat service, yet they wouldnt loss a penny (again, the service) and since it would be dirt cheap/free there would be a huge user base in no time.

Unless MS does it first I say the X360 has already loss the war...

 

Well, other companies could buy into the XBOX division. It is a well known house-hold name and does have a good reputation with gamers as a console (both do). It's just that the aggressive way Microsoft muscled it, plus the manufacturing defects of the 360 set them terribly back.

 

Microsoft should be talking to Matsushita, NEC, Samsung, LG and Toshiba into make 3rd party Xbox 360s. It would be nice to have a HD-DVD player that can play Xbox games, yeah I know it's not going to happen as companies have been burnt in the past but there is a sizable installed 360 base in the west and Microsoft know that they are better at selling crap... er I mean generic.. er I mean erm software then hardware, they should let people who can make these things do so as they could probably reduce the price of the machine and more importantly make it so it doesn't fall down every few months.