QUOTE(Pheidias @ Nov 4 2006, 01:11 PM)
Kage360 so when/if the 360 will be modable to run anything you want you won't do it since that breaks the "I only want a games system to game on" ?
I'll personally admit: I have a fully modded Xbox. I don't (currently) do anything illegal with it (er, technically modifying the console is probably in the gray area, but you know what I mean). I just run a lot of cool little apps. Streaming music and weather, file management, etc.
I modded it, frankly, for Halo. I didn't want to take my Halo disc to LAN games all the time so for a while I had Halo downloaded just so I could save my disc from getting scratched up, and I wound up installing tons of modded content specifically for in-house LAN sessions among friends. I never took the box online. I never distributed the disc, I never shared the files, etc. Just cool little personal uses.
Xbox 360 and the new Xbox Live basically deliver or may eventually deliver all of that. The music features are enhanced so I can play my music anytime. The file management is better. And download content is always expanding- maybe someday, a homebrew mod pack will make Marketplace as an official download. Like how Counterstrike: Condition Zero actually BECAME the Counterstrike that Valve now distributes.
There's not much reason to mod 360 IMHO. Not to mention the difficulty- the hard drive is on a proprietary connector, the disc drives just got anti-hack upgrades, the hardware is infinitely upgradable via the flexible firmware.... etc. Combine lack of need with the uphill battle, and it's not a good modding environment.
PS3 on the other hand is very desirable for modding... and it'll probably be easy. Sony promised the hard drive and BD drive should be fully swappable like PC hardware- which means there could be an instant market in ripping and customizing or selling off that hardware (rip out the $500 BD drive and sell it as a $1,000 player, install a cheap 100GB drive on a PS3 and resell it for a higher price, etc). Sony makes a huge deal of HDMI's anti-piracy power... but if you could hack the PS3 to download a disc straight to the hard drive, outputting the movie in full 1080p via Component cables can't be too far away.
Here's a big one: PS3's current online plans don't allow for messaging people, invites, etc, across games. How long until there's a homebrew pack to allow for Xbox Live -esque functionality? Instant messaging and fiesharing, at the very least, will be instently huge. Hacking is basically demanded here. PS3 lacks functionality that Linux devs could probably implement. Et voila! An out-of-the-box reason for lots of users to get modding.
Combine potential ease of hacking (at least on the drive side for starters) with a real NEED to get things hacked out-of-the-box, and you've got a climate for massive mods.
IMHO.