Game piracy is one of the biggest problems of game and console manufacturers and any of the previous attempts to curb piracy has met with failure both on the part of the game manufacturers and game console companies.Recently, game console manufacturers have started turning to a more radical way of preventing piracy by instituting periodic firmware updates to their respective machines. These firmware updates not only bring additional new features to the machines, more importantly, it attempts to fix any vulnerabilities the machine may have that can be exploited by hackers and pirates that would allow them to play pirated game discs.

So far this tactic has worked fairly successfully. Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft have all instituted firmware update protection in all of their machines. Unfortunately, there is no protection from a firmware update that is fundamentally defective.

The recent firmware update that Microsoft released for the Xbox 360 had the unfortunate effect of �bricking� a number of machines, effectively rendering them completely useless pieces of plastic. A number of Xbox 360 owners reported getting an Error Code E71 when they installed the update, which was released this fall.

Microsoft claims that only one per cent of Xbox 360 owners were affected but has already stated that they are committed to resolve the problem immediately � which is still not a good enough statement for the affected players who will not be able to play Gears of War this week.

[tags]sony, Nintendo, microsoft, xbox 360, Gears of War, game discs[/tags]