So here in Argentina. the 360 will not sell anymore more lol. all the consoles are chipped.

So these are the mods that allow cheating then. That's cool, I quickly tired of playing Halo 2 online when it seemed like every game had someone who could run 100 mph, jump 100 ft in the air, and put a suddenly fatal pistol bullet in your head from across the map with a single shot. Banning the system, heck that's better than cool, that's awesome.

I don't know what effect it would have on sales, could drive them up as banned gamers buy Elites (hmm, wonder if that had something to do with it), or it could drive them down as such gamers stick with PC's.  Or it could have no effect.

well this ban will definitely cut live's profit. as I mentioned the large % of pirated user in another thread, banning pirated user will definitely lost that portion of live subscription fee permanently, and no it'll not boost hardware sales either. pirated user will always stay as pirated users. They wont go out and buy a new system to just to play live and need to buy legit copy for that.

Pirated users are marginalized and MS doesn't care about profiting from them in any way, shape, or form. By cleaning up live and scaring honest people into actually buying the games they play, they stand to profit much more in the long run. 

Pirates who act as if they are helping a company like MS by throwing them $50 a year are naive. Admit that you're a menace to the company and that the company will end up profiting more by removing you and then move on.

True.. how many people quit Diablo 2 because of cheats? Counter Strike? Halo 2?

A cheat free environment is something that Microsoft can control with Xbox Live.

This will not be the case for PS3's, Sony will have very little control over hackers and cheaters.

Thats great thanks for all the ideas guys.

Why would you quite Diablo 2 because of cheats?  It's not really a competitive game.  What kind of cheats were there anyway?

People mod their consoles for many reasons.  I have custom firmware for my PSP so I can play my games off of my memory stick for better load times and battery life.  I can also play my PS2 off of a hard drive so that I don't have to change my discs and the games also load faster.  Also, the PSP allows you to play emulators when you use custom firmware so that's of course nice.

Obviously, cheating sucks so if they are actually preventing some of that I guess that's a good thing.  As much as they charge for online gaming, though, it would suck to not being able to mod your console for non-cheating purposes. 

piracy is the bane of microsoft's existence... they've had tons of trouble with Windows/Office piracy, so they could care less about banning a modder. Modded systems usually = less software sales for that person. And people have no right to complain. I'm sure its in the xbox manual "MODIFYING THIS SYSTEM MEANS YOU ARE SCREWED TEEHEE" or some other paragraph about how you shouldn't do it. If you wanna mod your system, thats great, but don't expect microsoft to let you play on their online gaming network.

Hard to tell if this will effect sales or not, more people might buy real games then :P But i know alot of people are keep to chip the console when they get it - so if they know they cant then they might decide not to purchase it But i think it have a bigger effect in countries that are big into piracy, not so much in UK and US which has its biggest sales

BTW, the beta won't ban you for things that would look like cheating, since those could just as easily be glitches, since this is a beta.