The company affirms its position against piracy when it announced a new policy concerning modified consoles connecting to its online Live service. Gamers prefer modified consoles for a variety of reasons. Modified consoles can play copied games, pirated version. Other used them to used backup versions while keeping the original version.

The company does not ban the user’s account but rather the modified system themselves and will not be able to access the Live service using their modified console. This will benefit users who did not modify their console and continues to buy original games rather than the pirated copy. Microsoft is very strict when it comes to the topic of piracy. If a gamer modifies his or her console, this will enable him to purchase pirated copies of games. Modified consoles connecting to the Live service will receive and ominous sounding error – “Status Code: Z: 8015-190D”. Even people using the new firmwares with disc-jitter are detected and eventually banned.

Microsoft’s official statement goes like this:

As part of our commitment to our members, we will not allow people that have been detected by our system to connect using their modified console. The company will continue to enforce this rule to ensure the integrity of the service and protect our partners and users.

This act is to prevent hacking, cheating and most important piracy. Even though the affected parties are the ones using modified systems. After the big announcement of Microsoft, hundred of feedbacks were flooding the Xbox Live Blog. Some praised this move but others have complaints like they are banned from connecting to Live even if they are using a non-modified console. This is a problem that Microsoft has to see and plan new solutions to fix this problem. Will this be a solution to minimize the continuing problem on piracy.