Oh, of course, today mod chips aren't much of a factor, because as you said they are more trouble than it is worth. However, you don't think that if a console company designed a lock-out chip to keep used games from playing that it wouldn't re-mobilize the entire pirate industry? If such an extreme action were taken you would see a proportionally extreme reaction. In this day and age it might not even be a mod chip, it could be a firmware hack or something similar. There are only a few hundred (dozen?) engineers working at Microsoft and Sony, but there are thousands of equally qualified programers who would be willing to best them. Much the same as you don't have to pay for any PC software if you don't want to, hackers will find a way if the insentive is high enough, especially since the architecture of the next gen systems is more like PCs than ever.