Datel Sues Over Disabled Xbox 360 Memory Devices

The most recent Xbox 360 update brought more than Twitter and Facebook support to the system; it also disabled third party memory devices such as Datel’s Max Memory cards, which allowed the use of SDHC cards of up to 16GB to store game saves. Skeptical gamers viewed it as a money grab by Microsoft, forcing gamers to pay for much more expensive first party storage devices. Datel initially expressed disappointment at the move, claiming it was “(unhappy) to see that Microsoft are taking these steps to prevent customers from exercising their freedom of choice,” but they have since escalated their response, filing suit against Microsoft, claiming that the update was an “anti-competitive downgrade”. Per their legal representation’s official announcement of the lawsuit:

“For many years, Datel has brought to the public products that offer more capacity, extra functionality or other game enhancing features with the aim of offering a reasonably priced alternative to first-party accessories,” said Datel founder Mike Connors. “The Max Memory card plugs into the Xbox 360 and allows a user to store games, characters, and similar information. It permits a player to transport game information between Xbox systems. The Microsoft memory card does exactly the same thing—with the difference that it offers only one-quarter the memory while listing for the same retail price. Datel engineered the Max Memory card to be 100% compatible and over 50,000 Max Memory cards have been sold without a single report of harm to the Xbox console.”

However, it should be pointed out that this is not the first time Datel’s products have met with resistance from console manufacturers. Datel has a history of releasing products whose uses were of questionable legality; earlier this year Joystiq revealed that Datel was in midst of the litigation process with Sony over their never released “Lite Blue Tool”, which Sony insisted was created primarily as a means to facilitate hacking of the PSP-3000. Nintendo has also taken action against Datel’s products in the past, putting out firmware updates designed to disable Datel’s Freeloader, which allowed gamers to circumvent region locks on the console. Their Xport utility for “backing up” Xbox 360 hard drives is also commonly made available on warez sites that provide instructions for modding consoles to allow piracy. This is the first example TeamXbox can find of Datel filing suit in response to action taken against it by a console manufacturer. Microsoft did not reply to requests for comment by the time this story was published.

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