Image courtesty of Wikia.
After Microsoft began banning Xbox Live accounts due to unauthorized modding of the base console, it seems that there’s already a way to get around the banning, but only if your XBox hasn’t already been banned. This banning has been implemented in response not only to the modding of consoles and the ability to run various mods when you play offline, but also online for a few. They’re also used by bad guys to play “illegally appropriated” copies of games.
Of course, one of the major reasons modding is prevalent is that people want to play backups of their games, as well as games from other territories such as Asia and the UK. For years, gamers have struggled with both of these issues on home computers and on consoles. Many games are hard to come by today in replacement form, and gamers should be able to run legal backups of their games instead of the actual games. On Windows, service application such as GameJackal (now no longer for sale, but bought recently by SlySoft) allow this for most games, but there are still problems with Starforce games. Other solutions are to use programs like Slysoft’s CloneCD or Daemontools.
The issue of territories are tied to an Old World Market model where different products are released into different regions by companies over particular time periods. Some products don’t even make it to particular territories due to licensing or regulation. In today’s world of global commerce, this concept of territories shouldn’t exist, but still does because of differing market force in operation in territories: a game that costs $50 in the US can be bought for less money legally in another territory because the financial market there will not bear that price point. Lately, Sony (to their credit) has started to release all of their PS3 content with no territorial blocking (region encoding) in the actual product. This should be A Good Thing(TM) because it means that you should be able to source your product from wherever you want to and pay for it based on what the purchasing market will bear. However, leveraging intellectual property laws, Sony can still restrict the sale of products by limiting the sale of items in particular markets, and have done so successfully. In essence, controlling product in territories is no longer done at the technical level, but at the economic and legal level. Digital distribution will change this further in the future, but is also affected by it. Even Nintendo suffers from this because they often release products only in one territory such as Japan when there is a market in the US for it. There are a number of reasons for this not to happen, but the cost of localization and the low projected sales are probably the major two.
There’s another problem with consoles these days in that games are often suffering from Patch-do, or the art of Release And Patch Later, as I like to call it. Consoles used to crow that when you bought the game, it was fully finished and there were only a few, if any bugs. A game couldn’t be patched because there was no way to update content centrally and no way to keep the changes after the console was switched off. With the advent of media storage in consoles and the use of a computer network, patches can now be applied to console games to correct problems, to supply additional content, or to make sure that consoles are authorized to play particular products (as seen by Microsoft’s banning response). This approach is problematic, because it means that games may no longer be as polished, and that delivery system for content/patches can be compromised. It might not be easy, but it can be done, and someone will do it at some point. This means that the companies providing these games are going to try to control who can or can’t use a product and newer content controls will be in place again and again. Addition of DRM/content controls will affect honest consumers more than dishonest ones, and they will become more and more frustrated as all these controls are implemented.
We’ll have to wait and see how this game of hack-and-mouse plays out on the XBox 360 because it’s something that will crossover to both Nintendo’s and Sony’s newest game platform. Watching how Microsoft handles this will allow the other companies to leverage the experience of Microsoft and its Live subscribers and hopefully stop disenfranchising of the consumer base.
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