Microsoft recently took action against the large pirate community, banning it’s members from using the online ‘Xbox Live’ service.

I’ve always been pretty strict on pirating video games. It’s probably down to the fact that you have to physically modify your console in order to play pirated games, well that and the fact I think games are worth the money. In comparison a Blu-ray movie at £18 which i may watch upto 3 times provides 6 hours of entertainment, but I bought Halo 3 for £30 and have been playing it for hours and hours for over 2 years now…

Anyways, here’s what happened. Microsoft can detect your xbox console by a unique ID (a kinda serial number) when it’s connected to Xbox Live via the Internet. Recently they’ve also rolled out the ability to do a system check to see if your hardware’s been modified. The action they’ve chosen to take is to permanently BAN all consoles that have been modified from Xbox Live approx 1 million people have been cut off, out of the 20 million that are registered on Xbox live.

So what does this mean? well… if you’ve been banned, you can still use your console offline to play pirated games. So what are you missing out on? Well, you can’t send or receive messages from friends, download demos or videos, or play online multi-player.

What can you do? – well you could go and buy a new console! all that thieving over the years has saved you a tonne of cash, so why not spend £199 on a new console. Microsoft have even been decent enough to let you still transfer you gamertag and profile over to the new console un-affected. It’s just simply your old console that’s been blacklisted, and don’t even think about trying to sell that thing on ebay, trust me, no-body wants them.

Stop your whining. If you’ve been cut off, I’ve got no sympathy for ya! You should have been paying for games like the rest of us, and as for all those people who insist they have the right to make back-up copies of games they’ve bought? well we all know that’s a loada crap. Anyways you still broke the EULA (end user licence agreement) which you agreed to when you bought the console on that states you are not permitted to alter the software running on Microsoft’s hardware. If you don’t agree with this, then you shouldn’t own an Xbox. It’s a code of conduct we all agreed to when we bought our consoles and it’s drives me insane when I see people gettin away with pirating games, now they can’t.