Earlier today we brought you news that a user had gotten his Xbox One dispatched to him early by Target. This of course was a mistake, but naturally the person who got their hardware early thought it was rather freaking sweet! Until Microsoft banned his console of course.

Now I’m sure many of you will be thinking Microsoft are scumbags for doing this, he shared mostly public information about the UI, game installs etc and no real harm was done. Yet it is clearly a breach of contract with Microsoft as per the terms of service that since the console is unreleased it is classed as Beta hardware. Microsoft reserve all rights to ban any pre-release, beta, dev unit that shouldn’t be in use, which is exactly what they did.

This is mostly because the gamer will be running the console pre-update, without day one patches on games and will effectively be showing off unfinished products in a way that could be damaging in terms of PR if people were led to believe that this was the final state of affairs, when it likely is not.

One developer has spoken out about this on Reddit;

“He did buy a product, a product not released until the 22nd. The product was delivered in error, but that doesn’t change the fact it’s an unreleased product and most likely classified as a beta product. Microsoft reserves the right to suspend/ban that console under the TOS. That being said, I was ambivalent about the leaks we saw today. Leaks are seldom good for the development team, even if they are positive. It represents thousands of hours of work that may or may not be in an unfinished state. All it takes is one instance of something that was mis-communicated or misconstrued, throw that through the internet media machine and you’ve got a disaster. On the flip side, it was quite refreshing and encouraging to see everything we’ve done received so well. It was a little emotional for me when I saw numerous approving responses to Marc and Yusif’s demo yesterday morning. I think many of us on the team sometimes forget to take a step back and see the product work as a whole because when you work on the console, all you see are the features that still need work and the bugs that need fixing. At least this was the case for the past 6 months or so. Personally, I hope it’s only a temporary suspension until launch day.”

Hopefully the unlucky user can get the ban over turned given the fact that he got the console by accident due to a shipping error, and how the hell can they really expect every kid not to open the box and play with what must be one of the few, if only, consumer Xbox One on the market.

Thank you Gaming Bolt for providing us with this information.

Image courtesy of Gear Nuke.