A few tweets started popping up yesterday from folks like Major Nelson and Stephen Toulouse saying that they are already seeing illegal copies of Halo 3 ODST being played online and are ready to drop the hammer on them. Toulouse’s exact tweet goes a little something like this: “Hrm. I spy with my little eye some *illegitimate* ODST players. No early play for you. Commencing permabans.” Bring it down big boy. So what kind of punishment will the pirates be looking at?
In many cases a gamers Xbox Live account will be banned from the service, which usually isn’t a problem for most folks as they could just create a brand new one. It’s going to be a little tougher this time because Microsoft are looking at dishing out console bans as well. As most of you may have already heard, ODST was already sold to gamers early in some stores in France, which begs the question, how do they know who has actual copies and who downloaded the game. We have our theories that it could even be remotely (conspiracy hat activated) possible that Microsoft themselves leaked the game in order to track down and sink the pirates, although that is fairly unlikely. My theory is that each copy is assigned some sort of unique number and it would be pretty easy to spot if one number is being reported in over live a couple zillion times. We will never know because Microsoft say that they do not want to disclose their methods for fear that pirates will find a way around it. As for those who have bought the game early, they will not be punished as Microsoft say that the retailers will be held accountable and not the people who, as far as they are concerned, bought a legitimate copy from a store that had the game up on the shelves. To all you pirates out there, Adios Amigos. | 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
12:45 pm
September 4, 2009
12:55 pm
Haven’t seen you online for the past few nights. Are you playing your dodgy version of ODST offline?
September 4, 2009
1:18 pm
Nope, just catching up on Barbie’s Horse Adventures. That game is HARDCORE
September 4, 2009
3:19 pm
Yeah…nothing beats a little HARDCORE horse on chick action
September 7, 2009
9:53 am
hahahahahahahhaahahhaah
hilarious i tell u