Bob moved his Xbox over today. It's modded. Despite a wealth of Xbox games, I spent about 4 hours tonight playing Chrono Trigger for the SNES emulated on his Xbox. Some of the Xbox games look really nice, but the best feature of the Xbox is the fact that it's a computer and can have software like this emulator added to it. If this capability came with the machine out-of-the-box, I'd have bought one long ago.

By keeping your machines closed and forcing game producers to pay a hefty licensing fee, you're keeping a wealth of free applications and games from being written for your system. The availability of this software would make your machine more appealing to own.

And who knows, maybe I'd be inclined to buy a few more games if the games available were a little less... i dunno... lowest-common-denominator. I've got a PS2, which I use largely as a DVD player. Bob has an Xbox, which he uses as a DVD player and an emulator. The games that you're licensing mostly suck, and they're not worth the money.

I suppose I'm out on the fringe here... obviously the underpriced hardware/overpriced software model is working fine and has for a couple decades now, so somewhere out there are a majority of gamers who think BMX XXX rules. I guess I'm just frustrated that I see the capacity in the hardware to be so much more than it is, but it's hamstrung by greedy, short-sighted people.