Microsoft’s recent wave of bans, hitting somewhere between 600,000 and one million Xbox 360 owners depending on whose figures you listen to, there aren’t official numbers yet, has seen the company come under investigation for a class action suit from a firm by the name of Abington IP.

While it seems that Microsoft is well within its rights to ban users from Xbox Live for violations of its terms of service, it’s being argued by those handling the investigation that Microsoft’s timing with the latest wave of bans is more than a little questionable. From Abington IP’s own page on the class action investigation,

“Although modification of Xbox consoles is arguably against the terms of use for Xbox/Xbox Live, Microsoft ‘conveniently’ timed the Xbox console ban to coincide with the release of the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 game and less than two months after the release of the very popular Halo 3: ODST game.”

Of course, there’s one big point that goes unmentioned by the firm handling the investigation, but is at least as important as any of those listed in the above paragraph. The September release of Sony’s updated PlayStation 3 console saw a massive sales spike, with Sony managing to shift a million consoles inside a twenty day period following the release (though its need tight-lipped about anything more accurate or long term than that).

With the Xbox 360’s price drop apparently having failed to slow the accretion of momentum for Sony’s console, it seems as though the timing on Microsoft’s part is convenient in terms of hardware sales versus competitors as well as just having users buying new Xboxes to play Modern Warfare 2 on.

Still, the attitude of many to the whole situation has been, “You hacked your console to play pirated games, then you got slapped… deal with it.” It’s likely we’ll see Microsoft argue something similarly simple in court, and in truth, it’s hard to argue with it, suspicious timing or otherwise.