Deedubbadoo

@Alba

Congratulations for adding nothing related to either my original comment or the article. The U.S. is the world as far as console sales go, accounting for 3-4x the number of consoles sales compared to Japan in the case of the Wii and PS3. Also accounts for 30x times the amount of 360s sold. Bottom line, I presented facts that claim that the U.S. is definitely more important than Japan in regards to sales. You told me how super awesome your PS3 was. Congrats again.

At the end of the day, all I can say is their loss. According to NPD Microsoft sold 277K consoles in July, giving them the highest console sales for 13 out of the last 14 months in the US. In six years, they have sold 1.5 million consoles in Japan. At their current pace, they will sell another 1.5 in the US in 5 months. At this point, if I'm Microsoft, I'll politely pull out of Japan and spend all of that advertising/marketing money that they have been pouring into that country for the last six years, to invest in new IPs, and to lock up exclusivity on other franchises. It is clear that the Japanese aren't interested in the Xbox, so shift the focus, energy, and finances back to those who are.

@Maunder

Just because someone disagrees doesn't mean they don't understand the law itself. There are some pretty ridiculous laws on the books, i.e. In South Bend, Indiana, it is illegal to make a monkey smoke a cigarette. You compared someone stealing your watch to this guying buying a domain name. He didn't steal anything, he lawfully purchased a domain name from a domain register. If anything GoDaddy should be on the hook for selling the domain, and continuing to charge the man for not only the domain registration but the proxy service. I understand the law completely, but I also understand that lawsuits cost money, and it would have been cheaper to just cut him a check for the domain. Not only are they spending money on attorney's fees, they look like assholes doing it.

Law or not, anyone on this blog has the right to disagree with it. It doesn't make anyone an ignorant hypocrite. Comparing domain registration to theft of a watch is ignorant. Questioning the rationality of a law such as this, is a freedom that we all have.

I understand the law, and how it will inevitably play out, but why not just toss the kid 25K and be done with. Maybe with a nice letter that says, you can take this cash or we can just take the domain in court. Does anyone honestly believe that he wouldn't take the money? Cybersquatting or not, it just paints Activision and GoDaddy in a negative light. Especially when a small check under the table would have cleared all of this up. I would almost guarantee that Activision's legal fees for this will cost more than the amount they would have needed to buy the domain from him.

@deedubbadoo

Damn you comment system!!!

@BananaBoat I was in the midst of typing "Cherrius Poppyius," when I read your comment...

@LENSconcept

Pretty sure part of the agreement of the IP buyout with 3DRealms was that DNF was to be finished and released by Gearbox. They weren't really given the choice of starting over from scratch. At the end of the day, it was a fun game like I expected with some shortcomings, but I definitely look forward to a ground-up Gearbox Duke Nukem reboot.

@geeksunny The way I read it is that they are proactively trying to warn people through Xbox Live. What about people who don't have Live, but download updates from Microsoft's website, and install from a disc. As far as your situation goes, once you are flagged to be banned, it's instantaneous as soon as you sign-in to Live. At least it was with me, attempting to sign-in...pop up with message about being banned. No one really knows how this is going to shake out though, if reports are correct, then I assume once the update rolls out tomorrow, we should have a concrete answer. If I were you, I would wait until the download is available on xbox.com, download and install from a disc. That way if your system is borked, you still technically won't be banned from Live.

I honestly just have my hand out hoping that mine is incompatible, because if it isn't, I'll gladly send it in to them in case I happen to be eligible for a new console.

What about people with consoles that are banned from Live? Also to the people asking about opening your console, most consoles that contain the reported Samsung / Hitachi drives are way out of warranty (3 yr) anyway.

@Chris DPSN AggieCEO XBLThe Aggi

I agree about the PSP completely but, Microsoft was losing money hand over fist on the original xbox. Not to mention, that the original xbox was blown wide open just like the PSP. Developers are not going to alienate a user install base as large as the PS3. Especially when the % of users that could even figure out how to modify their consoles, would be minuscule at best. It literally takes 2 minutes to flash a 360, yet there are still 10s of millions people on that don't do it.