So the holiday season is upon us. Halloween has come and gone, Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and Christmas will be here before you know it. In the middle of everybody indulging in pumpkin pie Microsoft decided to ban a couple of people from playing their Xbox 360 on LIVE. Ok, it was more than a couple; reports estimate that anywhere from 600,000 up to 1 million Xboxes have been banned.
The first thing to note is that these are not Gamertag bans, they are strictly console bans which allows for the pirate to purchase a new Xbox, retrieve their gamertag, move their HDD over and continue on like nothing ever happened. Of course, they have to purchase a new Xbox for this plan to work.
We have already seen a flood of banned consoles hit Craigslist and with all of these pirates getting rid of their banned systems, they will need to purchase a new unit to replace the old. My guess would be that most of these people will just pick up the standard Arcade SKU as it is only $200 since they can use the HDD that they already have. Of course, a pirate may decide to go with one of the other units if they choose to upgrade to one of those fancy larger hard drives so that they can utilize installing their pirated games.
Of course, tracking any of these numbers is nearly impossible save for maybe a poll on xbox-scene to gain some small idea of what the pirates are buying. Microsoft has also cleverly banned the systems just in time for the holiday system. Not only does this tell current owners that Microsoft is serious business and discourages from new people modding, it also masks the sales boosts in with the rest of the Holiday sales.
Had Microsoft banned 1M units in August, it would be much easier to relate an increase in sales to the system bans. Since this is during the holiday season, however, all of the sales resulting from system bans will just mix right in with the expected increase over the holiday season. Imagine of Microsoft was a character in an RPG. He has a strength of 33 and is about to level up but just equipped a new pair of boot that has a +1 to strength modifying. You don’t notice that +1 a whole lot, but it does make a difference.
http://golgotron.com/2009/11/microsoft-to-receive-sales-boost-due-to-console-bans/
