It's estimated that between 600,000 and 1 million Xbox Live users have been banned courtesy of Microsoft due to piracy.
However, those who were banned for modifying their consoles to allow for larger hard drives may have gotten the short end of this ban stick.
Solid figures on the number of bans were not revealed. But with the release of Modern Warfare 2 this week, the timing of these piracy and modification bans couldn't have come at a more interesting time.
"All consumers should know that piracy is illegal and that modifying their Xbox 360 console to play pirated discs violates the Xbox Live terms of use, will void their warranty and result in a ban from Xbox Live," Microsoft said in a statement Wednesday.
However, those who were banned for modifying their consoles to allow for larger hard drives may have gotten the short end of this ban stick.
"It's fair for people to feel that they should be able to do whatever they want with something that they have bought, but it's also fair for Microsoft to do everything it can to reduce the risk of piracy," said Dave Taylor, publishing director for GamerZines.com.
"In some cases though, modding (modifying) is done to allow a bigger hard drive, and given that the supplied hard drives are still very small comparative to what is available on the market, and expensive also, you can see why some people are going to be very angry."
However, he said, "the biggest problem in banning modded consoles — and this gets missed by most people — is that it is the console itself that gets banned. So many of these consoles get sold secondhand, even sometimes unwittingly by stores (that) accept them as trade-ins, to people who assume they have just bought a functioning console. And while it might technically boot up, the console is blacklisted and therefore pretty much useless to them."
"In some cases though, modding (modifying) is done to allow a bigger hard drive, and given that the supplied hard drives are still very small comparative to what is available on the market, and expensive also, you can see why some people are going to be very angry."
However, he said, "the biggest problem in banning modded consoles — and this gets missed by most people — is that it is the console itself that gets banned. So many of these consoles get sold secondhand, even sometimes unwittingly by stores (that) accept them as trade-ins, to people who assume they have just bought a functioning console. And while it might technically boot up, the console is blacklisted and therefore pretty much useless to them."
Solid figures on the number of bans were not revealed. But with the release of Modern Warfare 2 this week, the timing of these piracy and modification bans couldn't have come at a more interesting time.