It's like thousands of pirates cried out … and were suddenly silenced

Not even space pirates were prepared

Here’s one reported by the BBC last night: Microsoft have banned close to 1 million Xbox Live users in the last 24 hours, all of whom apparently had chipped or modified consoles and have been playing pirated games:

Microsoft told BBC News that banned machines will be permanently barred and “unable to connect to Xbox Live”.

A message displayed on affected consoles said there was “no recourse for terms of use violations”.  Microsoft has barred as many as 1m gamers from Xbox live for modifying their consoles to play pirated games.

“Users of banned Xbox consoles can recover their profile to another, unmodified Xbox 360 console to resume their Live service,” the firm told BBC News. “The banned console will be unable to connect to Xbox Live.”

However, modified consoles will still work offline.

This is apparently an on going plan to stamp out games piracy, although noise has been made that it was to curb the pirating of Modern Warfare 2. One gamer’s response to being cut off is here, though to be honest it smacks of false witness journalism, so take it with a grain of salt.

The full BBC article is here.  Anyone outraged by this should note that somebody already made the angry Hitler version of events, so you don’t need to make another one.