Hacking the Xbox 360: Impact on consumers

Two of the 10 stolen Xbox 360 developer kits were found in the Austrian home of “Hamtitampti”, one of the operators of SmartXX.com. According to a statement of SmartXX’s “Hamtitampti”, there’s a total number of 21 unauthorized Xbox 360 developer kits out in the wild!

What does the prospect of the Xbox 360 being hacked mean to consumers?

Maybe directing some of the Xbox 360 prototypes to the hacker scene was just a decoy to draw attention away from those that really pulled the strings in this unprecedented case of industry espionage.

Many mod chips and other re-engineering devices have their origin in China - the same place where Microsoft has contracted a number of factories to produce the amazing amount of units required to satisfy the demand caused by the simultaneous world-wide release of the Xbox 360 console.

Paranoia must be rampant at Microsoft, with the suspicion of internal moles that had knowledge of the delivery of the Xbox 360 prototypes.

What could be worse for J Allard and other Microsoft executives than the idea of Ken Kutaragi (of Sony’s Playstation 3) inspecting an Xbox 360 prototype on his desk right now?

Despite paranoia of a possible mole within Microsoft, it seems much more likely that the indiscretion has its origin at or near the place that manufactured and shipped the prototypes in the first place.

Everyone in the logistical chain from manufacturing the devices, packing the boxes, and writing the destination labels for the developer kit packages could have been involved.

On the Internet, information can spread around the world in seconds. Everyone is contactable via email, and with the gazillion of dollars at stake, bribery attempts involving sizable amounts of money are probably not so far fetched.

Is any aspect of those stolen developer kits good news for consumers? Probably not.

With this debacle, Microsoft has suffered a defeat to the hackers before the Xbox 360 is even released.

Microsoft is going to extreme lengths to make the Xbox 360 as customizable as possible to lower the allure of modifying the console for casual gamers. Hackers won’t care… for them it’s a technical achievement to turn a video game console into something that it wasn’t designed to do.

J Allard makes an important point: If hacking on the Xbox 360 becomes rampant, services like Xbox Live are in jeopardy. At xb360info.com, we certainly agree with this point of view: Just like we need to be careful which content our kids can access on the Internet, we may need to be cautious about content available on Xbox Live.

But it’s not just the kids - who knows whether our information will be safe when we play online?

This disaster could truly have a bad ending for consumers and Microsoft alike, spoiling our hope for worry free online gaming for all of us.

Let’s hope the perpetrators are caught, and our idea of a happy gaming world - including great games, a powerful Xbox 360 console, and a truly fantastic Xbox Live service - can prevail.

By Markus Weichselbaum, Xb360info.com Editor

Related:

• Xbox 360 Developer Kits stolen in Germany
• SmartXX speaks out about stolen Xbox 360 consoles