Microsoft cracks down on Xbox Dev Mode homebrew

[AnotherLinus]

Summary

Dev Mode has been a popular way to access homebrew applications on the Xbox One Series consoles, something that LTT did a video on about a year ago.

Microsoft are now citing a "store presence" clause - if you haven't published anything on the store they will disable your Dev Mode access.

 

Quotes

Quote

You've probably heard about a trick that allows you to turn the Xbox Series X or Series S into a glorified emulation system with the ability to run PS1, PS2, GameCube and Wii games — but it looks like Microsoft is finally clamping down on it.

It sounds like Microsoft is suggesting that because these "developers" aren't actually utilising their accounts to create games or apps as intended, the accounts are essentially inactive and are being removed as a result — even despite the fact that people have paid $20 for them, which is certainly a bit of a bummer.

 

My thoughts

I am disappointed with this move, and I wonder if this store presence clause was in the developer agreement a year ago or if this is something they added recently to stop emulation.

Workarounds exist for now with unlisted apps on the store but those will probably get deleted as soon as Microsoft finds them.

I consider this especially relevant for LTT as they did a video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ5aqx02QDI

 

edit: Perhaps one outcome is that the store will be flooded with garbage applications to keep people's dev mode access enabled.

According to the sources, once your account is disabled you can ask for a 90 day extension.
Perhaps a follow up video on making a crappy Flappy Bird clone within 90 days is a possibility?

 

Sources

https://www.purexbox.com/news/2022/01/xbox-begins-disabling-dev-mode-accounts-removing-access-to-emulators

https://gbatemp.net/threads/microsoft-disabling-dev-mode-access.605538/

https://reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/rw1fbw/dev_mode_gone/

 

Edited January 5, 2022 by AnotherLinus
additional thoughts

[Lightwreather]

Welp, all plans of me getting an xbox are now out the window (if they were to begin with)

[lieder1987]

Well poo, I just bought a Series X and I had planned on doing this.

[jagdtigger]

1 hour ago, AnotherLinus said:

if you haven't published anything on the store they will disable your Dev Mode access.

Wanna bet this will end up as sony's fiasco with other os?

[StDragon]

2 hours ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

Welp, all plans of me getting an xbox are now out the window (if they were to begin with)

You can't toss plans out something that's not there. For that, you must be running Windows.

[Mark Kaine]

3 hours ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

Welp, all plans of me getting an xbox are now out the window (if they were to begin with)

seriously,  this was one of the few cool things it had going for it...

 

2 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Wanna bet this will end up as sony's fiasco with other os?

nah, times have changed, also nothing happened to Sony,  the ps3 got actually more popular after this move, which coincidentally coincidenced with the console being 100% fully cracked.

 

 

Spoiler

* i mean, i think they lost a lawsuit (hazy memory)  but in the grand scheme absolutely nothing happened,  and people who wanted to use linux could do so no problems iirc with cfw.

 

[jagdtigger]

28 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

also nothing happened to Sony

Nah, having your stuff cracked wide open is nothing  special and definitely didnt cause any harm....

[Mark Kaine]

19 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Nah, having your stuff cracked wide open is nothing  special and definitely didnt cause any harm....

either way this had nothing to do with other os. they removed other os and *then* it got cracked, something something leaked security keys, this is also why sony never was able to fully fix it.

 

people always seem to think it was "geohot" who did it, but he only got access to the gpu for "other os", the guy who did it was "failoverfl0w" incidentally using a "fail overflow exploit" as the name suggests, and the leaked security keys were the death knell,  nothing to do with "other os" at all.

 

i was on my ps3 24/7 back then literally,  i witnessed it all lol....

also yes, it helped sony in then end, the console got massively more popular after that, and actually made them money. 

 

 

[Thaldor]

Has there been some kind of exodus at Microsoft? Or have they just decided to shutdown their intelligence and go back to monkey? Or was the Winblows 11 included with something that has now already affecting Microsoft?

 

They really seem to be on a streak of fucking up. Winblows 11, Winblows 11 and force feeding Edge, this and I probably forgot something.

 

Well expect the Xbox Series to be the first hacked console since PS3 and ready your sails, hats and bottles of rum! We're sailin' again AHOY!

[Mark Kaine]

55 minutes ago, Thaldor said:

Well expect the Xbox Series to be the first hacked console since PS3

wiiu and switch say hello  

[jagdtigger]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

either way this had nothing to do with other os

It had everything to do with other os, sony pissed off the wrong ppl and paid the price for it....

 

[Mark Kaine]

4 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

It had everything to do with other os

terrible video,  but he actually says the same thing i did, the "hack" came after other os removal.

 

5 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

sony pissed off the wrong ppl and paid the price for it....

i don't think any of this is confirmed, but there's at least some credence to it, because "someone" did leak those security keys (i don't really like repeating myself but that was crucial for the long term success of the fail overflow exploit, otherwise sony could have fixed this quickly) 

 

 

 

[jagdtigger]

17 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

"someone" did leak those security keys

It wasnt leaked, a haker group (failoverflow) found vulnerabilities in the ps3 and by exploiting them they succesfully exposed the root key. The key to the castle.

 

17 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

i don't think any of this is confirmed

Sony removes a popular feature pissing off a lot of ppl, few months later system is boned wide open. Yeah, definitely not related at all.... /s

/EDIT
Or if you still not convinced listen to darknet diaries ep 16...  In short HDCP got boned because it pissed off a law abiding citizen. Same thing happened with the PS3.

[My1]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

terrible video,  but he actually says the same thing i did, the "hack" came after other os removal

That is exactly the point tho.

 

The ps3 was not hacked because other os was a thing but rather because the removal of other os meant that homebrew makers lost their playground and so forced their way in. 

 

As in why would homebrew communities care about hacking the ps3 and possibly opening up piracy (which they are actually very much against) when there is an official way in? 

[Mark Kaine]

56 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Sony removes a popular feature pissing off a lot of ppl, few months later system is boned wide open. Yeah, definitely not related at all....

yeah, well there's a relation,  i guess i misunderstood what you meant, because there are actually people who say other os was "used to hack the ps3" and that simply didn't happen...

 

 

i also recently made a post saying as much,  the hack only happened after sony removed other os, because they ironically were scared it would be used to compromise the security... which probably could have happened, i guess,  but not in this way of full access to literally everything... and it's also funny because it really helped sonys popularity in the long term, sales kept rising, including dlc type of stuff, the illegal stuff was just something mostly kept under the rug and didn't impact sony's bottom line much at all.

 

13 minutes ago, My1 said:

As in why would homebrew communities care about hacking the ps3 and possibly opening up piracy (which they are actually very much against) when there is an official way in?

hey now i don't really know who these people  were really, but i always had the impression this was used for piracy and to cheat foremost, especially the usb key thing , "homebrew" wasnt really much of a thing, but that doesn't mean it wasn't the original intention perhaps,  i don't have that info obviously. 

 

i just know there were games, at some point, you literally couldn't play without being faced with cheaters... pretty much every fighting or shooting game... it took a while initially,  but after 2 years or so it was blatantly obvious. 

 

[jagdtigger]

17 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

  i guess i misunderstood what you meant

Or i written it badly, i might have passed the c1 exam but that doesnt mean my english is perfect....

[Salv8 (sam)]

8 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Wanna bet this will end up as sony's fiasco with other os?

i was wondering why the lawyers were migrating to the U.S, they must of smelled the huge upcoming class action lawsuit and decided to mate early this year in preparation for the carnage that is going to happen.

many may die but many do die during mating season...

[SeriousDad69]

They're mad people were buying Series S consoles and then not buying any new games because they were using emulation to play games that are actually good. They probably sell the Series S at a loss, so if you're not buying new games or getting monthly milked for XBLG/Gamepass they just straight up lose money.

[Arika]

2 hours ago, SeriousDad69 said:

. They probably sell the Series S at a loss, so if you're not buying new games or getting monthly milked for XBLG/Gamepass they just straight up lose money.

This is how all consoles from MS and Sony have been for a while.

 

----

 

Edit: think we're going to get a "their platform their rules" from a certain group of people? 

Pressing x to doubt so hard my thumb is at the centre of the earth

[GoodBytes]

Sounds to me that recently, it gain a lot of popularity thanks to YouTube (and maybe forums) exposure, lots of account were made, and now it got the attention of  big publisher(s) and kinda forced Microsoft to apply it's policy.

 

Microsoft never seemed to care about emulators, but it's been seen as disease by other companies.

[jagdtigger]

1 minute ago, GoodBytes said:

but it's been seen as disease by other companies

The only disease i see here is companies sitting on their IP doin nothin but shooting down every project that aims to resurrect their old games....

[demonix00]

7 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

either way this had nothing to do with other os. they removed other os and *then* it got cracked, something something leaked security keys, this is also why sony never was able to fully fix it.

The only reason why the xbox one and the xbox series systems haven't been cracked wide open was because of access to dev mode, and now they've moved the goal posts relating to access to dev mode every security researcher and anyone who is interested in breaking the security on the xbox one and xbox series consoles is going to be doing that.

 

Sony removed other OS because of "security reasons" which prompted people to try and break the system wide open and they did because sony screwed up in regards to their security keys which they couldn't fix completely.

[GoodBytes]

Update:

Was an error on MS part. They are fixing it.

 

On Twitter, Microsoft Jason Ronald said they were aiming to do their non active account clean up, but the routine closed accounts that they didn't intended to do. They are working in reverting the affected account that should not be deactivated.

 

He says, on Twitter:

Quote

As part of a regularly scheduled maintenance to clean up inactive accounts, a number of Partner Center accounts used to enable Developer Mode on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S consoles were inadvertently deactivated.

 

We are actively working on identifying and reenabling these accounts as soon as possible. Once an account has been reactivated, users will be able to reenable Developer Mode on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S consoles.

 

If your account was accidentally deactivated and you would like to restore access sooner, feel free to contact ReportApp@microsoft.com. We apologize for the inconvenience and we are working to remedy this as quickly as possible and thanks for your patience.

 

 

 

[TetraSky]

Good that it turned out to be a false alarm.

[Kisai]

16 hours ago, AnotherLinus said:

 

 

edit: Perhaps one outcome is that the store will be flooded with garbage applications to keep people's dev mode access enabled.

According to the sources, once your account is disabled you can ask for a 90 day extension.
Perhaps a follow up video on making a crappy Flappy Bird clone within 90 days is a possibility?

 

 

Doesn't stop Nintendo or Steam.

 

I think ultimately, Microsoft is making the right decision. The dev mode is in fact intended for development. Perhaps they could give exceptions for where the console is being used as an assistive device, but I don't see why someone would believe Microsoft wouldn't close this loophole.