Did Microsoft Kill Chances of Future Success by Banning of Modded XBox 360s?

It does not take me to tell you that one of the biggest video game industry stories of this year is Microsoft's banning of modded Xbox 360s. As a business advisor and writer, this leads me to speculate about the chances of another successful video game system coming in the future from Microsoft.

The original Xbox was released in 2001 in the United States. The Xbox 360 was released in 2005, so with the Microsoft product lifecycle (since Microsoft like to come out with a complete revamp of the products it offers every few years), there is a good chance that they are currently working on the next version of the Xbox somewhere in the dark tunnels under Microsoft University in Seattle.

While the exact numbers of the number of customers that have been effected by Microsoft's banning of modded and hacked Xbox 360s can be debated through the fact that there are multiple percentage numbers floating around the Internet, it can't be debated that the number is significant. It can be assumed, even from the lowest percentage numbers that there is a significant number of people that purchased an Xbox 360 due to the ease of modded and hacking it.

In the past, a majority Xbox 360 owners that had been specifically banned from Microsoft's online system just went out and purchased a new Xbox 360 from a brick and mortar or online (then turned around and modded that one). This caused many market analysts to never truly be able to judge Microsoft's true market share (but talking about this will get me too far off of the topic at hand).

In the case of banned modded Xbox 360s, chances are good that customers will turn their backs on Microsoft. I have already seen the precursors to this in many of the forum postings that I have read on the top video game sites. This exodus from Microsoft is echoed over and over again from forum to forum.

When Microsoft comes out with a new gaming system, chances are very good that the wounds that Microsoft have dealt to the egos of many gamers will reopen. Doubts about changes that could come with the new system from Microsoft could deter many gamers from buying a new system.