Xbox 360 piracy spreads fast in China
Following the ongoing developments in hacked firmwares, it seems that the Walhalla of copyright breaching has now also embraced the new markets opened up: according to Gamasutra there is a fast growing market for pirated Xbox 360 games in China.
As they visited the country, one of the world’s biggest markets with well over 1 billion population, they spotted several recent 360 titles such as Hitman: Blood Money being offered for 30 Chinese yuan or $3.50 USD. With China taking pride in its complete independence of Western legislation, especially on the subject of copyrights and trademarks, the titles are being offered shrinkwrapped out and open in the street without any risk of the seller being stopped or prosecuted. In Shanghai there are stores or individuals offering to flash the Xbox 360’s disc drive BIOS for a fee to allow them to run the cheap games.
The question is ofcourse whether Microsoft will act upon the piracy before it runs rampant completely, since it is technically simply possible to stop all the current methods as we’ve reported before. For example updating the DVD-drive to have a public key required to decrypt the firmware embedded in its ROM would put an end to every publicly known exploit, but at quite some cost. Microsoft will probably remain quiet on the subject as long as there is no widespread open piracy in Western countries like with the previous box, and then deploy more fixes like the epoxy cover.
Kudos to CleanSweep31 for the find.
i just dont see why microsoft doesnt cover the insides with epoxy. like just dumping epoxy in it like theres no tommorrow. thatll show the pirates/modders
Exactly what the 360 needs to become a smash hit in that reigon.
The success of a console in South Asia depends on how easily games can be copied and distributed by the pirates b/c most people cant afford a $50…. ooops I mean $60 pricetag.
I don’t see what the big deal is. $3.50 for 360 games, I’d jump right on that if I could!
They should be forced to pay $3.60, bastards.
Doesn’t really seem fair that they are getting away with it though in china
heck yeah, stick to the man. if they catch on here i may even buy a second 360 and use it hacked. keep one for xbox live play.
i wouldnt do it. the only reason i would mod my old xbox would be to have a web browser, and emulators for nes/snes/n64 and stuff. my 360 is strictly for legal use.
This might be good news for the 360. MS might actually see some consoles flying off the shelves in Asia. If they are lucky positive word will spread about the console, and then Asians will start buying them just before the PS3 comes out and MS closes the security holes in future versions.
Hate to say this but # of consoles is NOT a good thing if there arent the game sales (licensed game sales) remember microsoft takes a loss on every consoles its the consoles to game ratio thats most important to microsoft and by that i mean LICENSED paid full price games… that they care about…
So may I ask why this took so long to post? I submittd it days ago.
This is not just China-centric. I spent all of 2005 in S. Korea and the availability of pirated Xbox hardware and games is staggering. They don’t even try to hide it there either. You can walk right into stores and walk out with an armful of pirated games for $2-$5 a piece.
:O piracy in China?! what next obesity in America?.
I was in china for about two weeks and people living there off of a normal salary seriously can’t drop 60 dollars on a game. Normal MONTHLY salary in china is about 300 US dollars. So, basically, either they buy the pirated games and at least play the 360 or they dont play it at all. I seriously think microsoft is just happy to find out people are playing their games over there
Does beg the question if they normally only get $300 a month why did they buy a 360 in the first place? Surely they want a Dreamcast or a Tamecube. DC’s start at around $20 up to $50(at my local market:) with games starting from just $1.50. For the Gamebrick add 25/35% more. problem solved. Seriously though M$ should beef up there Asian legal team and start cracking heads.
does copyright infringement mean anything to you? because it doesnt to the chinese population. They will slap a ferarri sticker on the 360 and call it something different, sell it for “cheapa” as they like to say to americans