Yeesh, if Circuit City hasn't stooped to a new low

You're not gonna believe how far these "big box" retailers have gone to try to bring backwards compatibility to the X360, Circuit City has now offered to install that feature into the X360 for $30 USD. That's ludicrous that they could offer up something that Microsoft can provide to you at no cost. Something tells me that I smell a lawsuit from this. Seems like Microsoft'll do everything in their power to keep retail stores to get this idea. Don't believe me? Here's the linky below:

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/09/01/circuit-city-will-make-your-360-backwards-compatible-for-30/

IF ( BIG IF ) there is no more to this story than meets the eye, that is indeed a new low. That, in fact would be a new low for almost anyone.

Bet that Microsoft isn't seeing red at the "Red Spot" store by now...

Newport Beach has more throwaway money than anywhere in the U.S. People will buy $500 sunglasses for their dog and every other car is a Mercedes. Trust me, no one there will miss $30.

*shrug*

Ludicrous to "us", but most people I know that aren't Geek-literate would quite happily plonk down $30 just so they don't have to think about it, no matter how much cheaper it is.

Why buy a name-brand computer when you can just build one yourself from components? Because people just wanna plug it in and go.

Not all people need this, just a large enough chunk that someone could quite conceivably say to themselves "heck, we can do it for them - but we're not a charity, so we'll charge them for it".

And why not? They provide a service in exchange for money. Use it, or not.

Yeah, bet that Best Buy's Geek Squad may catch onto doing this next?

Best buy tried to sell me $150 worth of "Internet Security" and "cleaning" when I bought a new PC for my parents. The only software included was $50 worth of internet security tools and the rest of it was the installation and removal of bogus software (like the AOL trial all retail machines seem to include). I refused it, but my parents might well have ended up buying it if I were not there.

Hey... I drive a 190e and I resent that (I think!) ; )

We fired a tech that worked for us in the Silicon Valley region of CA. Turned out he had a sideline selling the executives of these IT Hot starts his yearly maintenance package... He convinced them that straightening the cables to the printer and monitor sped things up. Sad thing is they paid $800.00 for a dust vacuum and cable unkink.... You would think they could do this themselves!

I think the point is that if you don't have an internet connection and you do have a lot of XBOX games then CC will put all the backward compatible stuff on your 360's HD so that you can play your old games.

Seems like a great idea to me.

Allan

Or you could just place an order on the free CD from Microsoft to get it for the price of Shipping & Handling...

> Or you could just place an order on the free CD from Microsoft to get it for the price of Shipping & Handling...

Ah, the store is not adding gouging, they are "adding value" by doing this for the customer at a small price. (sorry, I'm having a flashback to my marketing classes)

If they made it clear that this was freely available and were only offering it as a convenience for customers who genuinely did not want or were not able to do it, this would be true.

The problem is not that they offer the service. People offer services that any idiot could do all the time, and that's fine. Hell I can go to the store and buy onions which have been peeled and sliced for three times the price of plain old onions, and that's fine because they're not trying to make you believe that peeling an onion is impossible. If you're too stupid or too lazy to peel an onion and you've got more money than sense, I think that's fine.

The issue is how they represent that service. They are intentionally misleading people into believing that this service is not available for free, and that's not alright. You only have to follow the link RAM posted to see that even relatively tech-literate people saw the title, ad, or whatever and believed that there was no free alternative.

Yeah, I can walk into an EB Games or GameStop right now, find a $20 disc for the X360 in a retail package that adds the backwards compatibility code into the console's HDD, if MS even goes so low to have a disc that they sell in retail. Having a disc from Microsoft that can do the same thing, it doesn't make sense for a retail store to do all this for the average gamer. Seems like a lawsuit may be in order, Peter Moore could just walk into the CC HQ, and slap that document on their desk. The service should be in a CD-ROM product on a shelf in a bright-green case, not behind a counter with some 20-year-old geek.

In other words, Microsoft should be the one to offer this service, not a retail store, it's their console, and they should be the one to supply the right tools to the owner of the console, and to tell you step by step, how to do it in pictures. IMHO, that may get those big box retailers to discontinue that service.

Ok, the big question is...why isn't the xbox360 backawards compatible out of the box....why should you need to do anything at all to make it backwards compatible. Especially if all it takes is installing some stuff from a CD or the web. Why doesn't MS just sell completely configured backwards compatible machines in the first place?

Yeah, that's a great question, because unlike M$, their Japanese counterparts, Sony and Nintendo ENCOURAGE backwards compatibility. Sony said that they'd allow for PS1 and PS2 games to be played, and then Nintendo's gonna allow for GameCube discs and controllers to be hooked into the Wii, and Nintendo also has it that you can play your GBA games on the DS and DS Lite, so why doesn't Microsoft follow suit? At least the Japanese aren't as greedy...

If you can go and buy this disc for $20, and they are willing to find it and intall it for $30, whats the problem?

If I buy I new CPU, I can take my box to a computer shop and they will fit the CPU for £10. Whats the difference?

No computer store selling a Linux distribution on disc for $10 is under any obligation to mention that people could most likely download it legally and for free from the web.

I'm not suggesting it's the nice thing to do - and for friends and family I'd do it for them for free rather than let these sharks take their money - but they're certainly not doing anything especially wrong by offering it. Buyer beware, and all that.


RAMspeak.

Yeah, there you go again. I'm just saying that if Circuit City's gonna charge you for a service that Microsoft can do for you for no charge at all, then MS should take action against the big box retailers.

Yes, I know what you're saying. That's how I could so clearly tell it was RAMspeak.

So RAM if I can do something cheaper than you can, then I can sue you for doing it more expensive?

Come on, own up somebody. RAM is obviously a posting bot coded in Darkbasic.

<i>Ok, the big question is...why isn't the xbox360 backawards compatible out of the box....why should you need to do anything at all to make it backwards compatible. Especially if all it takes is installing some stuff from a CD or the web. Why doesn't MS just sell completely configured backwards compatible machines in the first place?</i>

Because the xbox 360 is a totally different architecture than the xbox... and Microsoft couldn't licence the same old technology from NVidia (where as Sony does all technology in house).

So xbox 360 emulates the xbox in a virtual machine. The virtual machine emulates the old games pretty well, but not good enough to meet the QA standards for xbox games. So the 360 will not play xbox games without a patch that brings it up to the proper QA standards. They develop a patch that fixes whatever random bugs happen because of emulation.

It would be nice if Microsoft would allow the 360 to run all games, but strongly reccomend the patch. I should be able to play the game and take my chances. But because of all the legal agreements, and QA standards, I can understand why they are not doing that.

Well, that's the same reason why Nintendo went to ATI and PowerPC, since Sony backed out of any deals since Nintendo backstabbed them after the SNES, and just before the N64 came out (which was why Sony did the PlayStation in the first place). Now, as for why Nintendo and Microsoft are turning to the same companies for their components is beyond me...

Here comes the Lilt man! Liiiillt!

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