So yesterday Microsoft flipped a switch, turning off access to the Xbox Live service for thousands of Xboxes that had been chipped (the BBC news report). These machines had been deliberately altered at the hardware level to circumvent the DRM (Digital Rights Management) part of games played on those machines. Chipped machines could play hacked games, in essence, without paying for them. I suppose this is the Xbox equivalent to jailbreaking iPhones.

The BBC report was interesting because it also linked to the story of an Xbox gamer ("Raz") who was "gutted" he'd been cut off. The relevant part of the story I want to quote is this:

I took it into a shop [the Xbox], there was a guy back there and I asked him and he did it for me [chipped it]. He charged £75 to get it chipped but at the end of the day I said to myself I'll pay £75 to get it chipped, after two games I've paid the money back.

I've probably saved about £600 and I've copied roughly 30 or 40 games. A lot of them I've downloaded or I've taken off friends that have downloaded themselves.

The interesting attitude displayed here is that Raz doesn't consider that there is a whole software/hardware ecosystem going on here. He just views it as him versus Microsoft, or him versus the Gaming World. Not him versus Activision, Eidos, EA, and all the other software producers. He views the software as somehow coming from the Xbox — "after two games I've paid the money back", he's home scot-free, he's paid his dues with the original hardware and the chipping and shouldn't have to pay any more.

The other point he raises is that:

I still think they should lower the prices. There are 16-year-old kids out there, they don't earn money so they go screaming to their parents saying, 'Can you buy me this game?'

Fair enough, one game once in a while but the amount of games coming out, good games, everyone wants to play them all. And for them to pay £50 a game?

So good games are coming out and he wants to play them immediately, and therefore he's forced to pay full price. Oh and the price is too high. Now I'll admit I've never played these games (I prefer adventure games, this kind of first person shooter makes motion sick), but when I've watched others play them, I'm always struck by the attention to detail paid by the artists and programmers to the scene and the action. And to me, coming from an entirely different part of the software market, that all spells money, costs, time, resources. And the game producer only has a smallish amount of time to recoup those costs by selling at full price before another good game comes out that everyone wants to play immediately and the producer is forced to cut prices.

Software is a funny old game, really. It takes time and money to produce it, but the product you manufacture has essentially zero duplication and distribution costs. People like this gamer focus on the latter (costs nothing to copy) and forget the former (costs a metric tonne of cash to make in the first place). Without the ability to cover one's expenses, software like this would disappear. The same goes for music and photographs, since they're both just software these days.

Now I know that open source software is free (albeit, subject to some legal restrictions like copyright and licensing), but it still costs money, effort, and resources to make. Ultimately, those expenses have to be paid for. For a widely supported open source project the price is paid by the free time of the developers who implement it. Similarly, some of the code might be provided by large companies that need to use the software and who are willing to subsidize the effort to make sure their needs are met; in this case, it's that company's products that provide the revenue to pay the price. Or the company provides free software, but the ancillary services like help, documentation, updates, fixes, maintenance, additional content cost money. Or it's the Government that subsidizes the open source software, in order to provide access to it for its citizenry, and of course it would be the citizenry that would pay for it through their taxes.

DRM, unfortunately (fortunately?), is not the solution. I've been bitten in the past by software becoming unusable because it's no longer installable or playable (for a couple of examples: I used to have some MSN music; the company I used to work for, TurboPower, was closed down along with its authentication servers; and In just over a year's time I won't be able to install Microsoft Money any more). The only way this would work would be to have an ICANN-like regulatory body that would be in charge of authenticating installs and copies. That is, instead of relying on the manufacturer to stay in business and to keep their servers up and running, the authentication step is done by a global-scope third-party. But, heck, the possibility of hacking a single body instead of numerous servers would be so attractive…

In the end, I suppose I personally am motivated by the fact I am in the software business. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is my motto when considering purchasing software, photographs and music, and so I always scrupulously plop the credit card down.

But of course, piracy will stay and still pay.