Originally Posted by
RCM
I don't think it would keep piracy down one way or the other. I'm of the opinion that those who pirate were never going to buy anyway generally.
That's a very bold statement, and one that simply isn't true unfortunately.
If you go and purchase a system, it follows that you will be purchasing something to put into that system. That's simply not the case if you can pirate everything on it. I know a couple people that purchased Xboxes because they absolutely loved Halo and wanted a system to play it on. They got a used system, modded it and have downloaded hundreds of games. They never even purchased Halo itself.
Had they not been able to mod the system, they have both said that they would've got it and Halo for sure. Of course, no one buys a game system for just one game, so eventually they would've got some more. Let's say they get Doom 3 and Halo 2 only. So they have three games. That's a total of six between the two people that I know.
And with the amount of stuff they have downloaded, they would probably have bought more than that.
Regardless, it is a loss of sales for the console. Let's say that they are in the minority for the console -- 1% of people are pirating. And there are, what, 5,000,000 or so Xboxes out there (I really don't know, and since this is an example it doesn't matter the actual number). 1% of that is 50,000 people pirating. If the total gained by Microsoft from the sale of those three games was $9.00 ($3.00 licensing per game), then a piracy rate of 1% would be equal to about half a million dollars.
That's still an effect of piracy. And if people aren't purchasing a console because they can't pirate on it:
1) Microsoft doesn't lose money selling a console (with a loss of $127) to someone who will never purchase a game.
2) Game companies don't have to worry about their games being ripped and put online early, like the big deal with Halo 2.
Those are two VERY big reasons to keep piracy in check. The harder it is to pirate, the less money is lost on hardware sales to people with no intention to purchase and the more money is made by game companies that don't have to worry about "well, the Xbox version will be raped and pillaged, so maybe we should just make an Xbox 360 version."
I'm not naive enough to think that this will thwart the pirates for a while, but the harder it is to pirate for a console, the less people will do it. And for that, I say to Microsoft hurrah. The Dreamcast showed exactly what can happen when piracy takes almost no skills and no console modification, and the difference between it and a better locked down system are light years.
Of course, Nintendo has the best locked down system of the current generation, and that didn't help them one damn bit.