See if you can join the dots on this one before The Man On The Street get to the end, chums. It's a fun game for all the family!

It's a well-documented fact that the consoles which have historically been the most susceptible to piracy have also been the most successful. From the Spectrum to the Amiga to the first Playstation, any generation of hardware which has had one machine whose games were more easily pirateable than its competitors, has seen that machine far outstrip its rivals in terms of sales of both hardware and software.

In trying to grab themselves a big slice of an established market which they weren’t previously a part of, Microsoft faced a couple of major challenges. In the existing players, they faced a company with a huge corporate dominance and unrivalled marketing strength, and a second company with arguably the world's most valuable intellectual properties of any kind, in the form of brands established over the entire history of videogaming.

It's fairly difficult to imagine that Microsoft would have created a games console with a hard drive and a PC-based architecture, and imagined that it would stay invulnerable to the attentions of the pirate community for very long. The hard drive in particular is something which has very few tangible benefits from a gaming perspective - other, of course, than restricting the lucrative sales of memory cards. Hmm.

We have ourselves in a situation where, with a pretty small amount of effort and an outlay little more than the price of the console itself - and without going near any dodgy blokes on market stalls - gamers can easily avail themselves of a limitless supply of Xbox games for around £1.50 each (see CHEAP AS CHIPS). Coincidentally, after a start in which it trailed third to the PS2 and Gamecube, and despite a spectacular lack of exclusive killer apps since launch day, the Xbox is now a clear second outside of Japan (where it never stood even a ghost of a chance), and strengthening by the week as Nintendo looks ever more beleaguered, deserted by publishers and retail chains alike.

Does anyone think this sequence of events is a fluke? Does anyone think it's come as a shock to anyone at Microsoft? The company can easily afford hefty short-term losses if the result is the ultimate destruction of one or both of their competitors. The expensive inclusion of the hard drive in the machine, for practically no sensible purpose from an economic or gaming point of view, is hard to explain in any other way. (Especially given its capacity, which is far, far bigger than it needs to be just to store save files, music for customisable soundtracks, and the odd bit of downloadable content for the tiny minority using Xbox Live.)

So has Microsoft deliberately created a piracy-friendly machine for the sake of the longer term? Have they taken a big financial hit just to knock out Nintendo (who would now surely be out of their tiny minds to even think about launching another console after two third-placers in a row – remember what happened when Sega wouldn’t accept they weren’t a hardware force any more, chaps), leaving them to concentrate on a head-to-head against Sony with the Xbox 2? Interesting business strategy, doncha think, my retail pals?

CHEAP AS CHIPS

Copied Xbox games for £1.50? Doubt this ludicrous-sounding statement? Here's the proof.

Consumers can now rent games, perfectly legitimately, from places like www.swapgame.com, with a monthly flat-rate fee of £14.99 entitling them to rent 2 games at any one time. If they sent games back the same day they arrived, that'd bring 20-25 games a month through their letterbox. (Your correspondent hasn't used the service himself, being a journalist who gets his games for free anyway, but is basing that estimate on experience of Webflix, a very similar outfit renting DVD movies by mail at the same rates.) That makes each rental cost about 70p.

If the consumer was to then copy the game to their Xbox hard drive, they could then send the disc straight back and play the game for as long as they liked. With a large replacement HD, commonly installed at the same time as a modchip operation (a 120GB drive, currently about £75, can hold dozens and dozens of games, and would bring the total cost of the chipping operation to not much over £100, ie slightly more than two games) they'd be sorted right there. But even with only the standard hard drive, it's easy, with almost no technical knowledge, to connect the Xbox to the PC with the official link cable, copy the installed files across, make an ISO and then burn the ISO with a DVD writer, producing a perfect copy of the original disc, for a further 75p or so for the blank DVD. Add a few pence for a DVD case and print out the cover from the net’s many cover sites like www.cdcovers.cc, and Consumer Jim has something that looks nice on his game shelf - and which he can then delete from the HD to make room for the next rental game - for a total outlay of £1.50 or so. (And of course, it makes for temptingly lucrative business for the professional pirate too, who can pump these copies out at markets and boot fairs for anything up to £8-£10 a shot. Nice margin, eh?)

It would have been incredibly easy for Microsoft to get round this (or at least add a relatively challenging extra layer of protection requiring coding skills and a separate “crack” for every game) by requiring the disc to remain in the Xbox drive as a “key disc” - like most PC games do - even when it's installed on HD. Yet they chose not to. Why might that be, do you think?