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Looks like someone on the Indian IE development team forgot how many fingers there are in “seven”. Oopsie. She sure looks happy though. :)

Click to see the full image.

I just received an email from Larry Hyrb, Director of Programming for Xbox Live!

Sorry Tor, for many reasons from business to technical, ripping of game titles to the Xbox 360 hard drive is not a scenario or feature we can support.

I get the business side of it, but not the technical. I guess I could go on and on and whine about it but I still can’t think of any problems that aren’t solvable here, especially not because of the technology. Case-in-point: Steam rocks, and it works. Essentially, I rip PC games to the hard drive all the time.

I can however see the publishers getting very very antsy about game ripping and possibly denying all access to a net distribution service. In ten years though, I think this is going to be the norm, and publishers in their traditional role will be left in the cold or diminished severely in power.

Microsoft, court the development studios and cut the distribution channels away.

In a recent interview J Allard (via Joystiq) claimed that the featureset of the 360 was designed to make modding unattractive and obsolete.

So putting piracy aside what did most of them do? They made it a media player. They had it connect to portable devices. They had it copy my music off of my PC so I could get it here. They did visualizers. They made themes. They made it something they could actually participate in. Well, we took a lot of those great ideas and said, “You want to make a theme? We’ll give you a theme editor. Go put themes on.” You don’t have to chip your box to make your box yours. You don’t have to unscrew it to put little green lights in it. Just rip off the faceplate and go put on a theme. Because everyone wants to do a lot of what legitimate modders wanted to do.

He leaves out one major convenience of modding, and that’s ripping games to the hard drive. Please please please, let us rip our games to the hard drive. I can’t stand scratching my discs, and I’m lazy as hell when it comes to switching cds. Given that the 360 supports detachable storage devices, it would be amazing to be able to just unplug your hard drive and take all your games, savedata, and everything else to a friend’s 360. The process for ripping should be as follows.

1. User plugs in hard drive via USB 2.0 or uses standard detachable HD.
2. Inserts game to rip.
3. Selects rip game from the menu.
4. Live prompts user for login, and game key, just like Steam does.
5. (Optional) User selects rip target drive.

Microsoft has DRM, it has Live! infrastructure, and patching capability. Make this goodness happen.

Update: Better yet, just implement something like Steam on Live!. I don’t want to wait for pre-orders. I don’t want to move my lazy butt to the store on opening day, or wait out in the cold at midnight. I want to be able to play my games on any 360, and I’m sure you want the retailer’s share of current revenue for yourself.