"Inside Source" Reveals RROD Secrets
Jake Metcalf of 8bit Joystick seems to have his own personal Deep Throat. A few months ago he leaked the info that Bungie would be splitting from Microsoft a full week before the press release confirmed the news, and now he's got an interview with someone claiming to have extensive knowledge of the Xbox 360's failure problems.
Even the staunchest Microsoft fan will admit that the 360 has a pretty serious reliability problem. Although they've never given out numbers, Microsoft extended the warranty for the system to an almost unheard of 3 years for the RROD problem, a move which has been said to have cost the company $1 Billion. Anecdotal reports of Xbox 360 failures put the rate at about 30%, a number that the mysterious source confirms. He also claims that the company is expecting 1 Million downed consoles just this quarter between new and repeat failures. As for how the problem got so bad, the source mentions a lack of experience, as well as a rush to beat Sony, but lays most of the blame at the feet of Microsoft leadership.
In the end I think it was fear of failure, ambition to beat Sony, and the arrogance that they could figure anything out, that led to the decision to keep shipping. That management team had made some pretty bad decisions in the past and had never had to pay a proportional consequence. I'm sure they thought that somehow they would figure it out and everything would end up ok. Plus, they tend to make big decisions like that in terms of dollars. They would rationalize that if the first few million boxes had a high failure rate, a few 10's of millions of dollars would cover it. And contrasting that cost with a big lead on Sony, would pay it in a heartbeat. They weren't even thinking about Nintendo.Compare that to Sony, who delayed their launch, even though they were behind, when their box wasn't ready.
In the interview, he goes over a laundry list of theories about why Xbox 360s fail, from overheating problems, cheap parts, and even "system killing games" like Gears of War and Dead Rising, ultimately concluding that you can't point to any one reason a console will fail and another won't. As far as newer Xbox chipsets, the source puts the failure rate at less than 10%, but "still too high."
Beyond the hardware failures, the interview also touches on how long Microsoft can go on not making a profit on their entertainment division ("They are just getting started"), the next generation Xbox ("don't look for it any time soon"), and how he came up with the idea for the Nintendo Wii years ago (join the club, pal).
Inside Source Reveal the Truth About Xbox 360 "Red Ring of Death" Failures [8Bit Joystick]
Dawdle
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 19 January 2008
· Comments (8)
Other stuff like this: failure, microsoft, rrod, rumor, xbox 360
All the President's Men is one of my all time favorite movies. Also "Inside Deep Throat" is a good flick.
Basically he just confirms everything most people already suspect. The ones who actually admit there are issues with the box.
Its good to know the falcons have lowered the failure rate quite a bit but i still don't know.
Like he said, I'm afraid of buying a falcon and getting back a xenon. Microsoft should basically say you are going to get the same type of Mobo back ... after all, microsoft was switch out parts all the time ... some are louder than others.
It is all to bad since I love Dead Rising.
The Xbox 360 has a lot of good games, this I don't think anyone can deny although most of it seems to be FPS base. It also has a fantastic online service.
But there's a lot of things I don't like about the 360. It just doesn't feel like a console - both hardware and software. To me, the whole thing seems a tad 'cheap' when compared to the Wii and the PS3. And the dashboard for it is too 'PC' still and horribly annoying. This is just all down to inexperience and I'm sure the next iterator will continue to improve.
AS chwisch87 mentions, it's already known and suspected.
I think that something people have sort of passed over because of the prevalence of RROD issues, is that the consoles still fail for other reasons.
I recently sent in mine because it would lock up within 10 minutes of gameplay. (usually much less than that.) we're talking an 8 month old machine getting returned for service. (and the one I got back is a launch console refurb. let's say I am not instilled with the most confidence here.) not once did the machine RROD, but it locked up before hitting the dashboard, when playing a game off the disc, when playing off the HDD, and even gave my copy of Final Fantasy XI one of those "nice" circular scratches.
MS has built possibly the shoddiest console ever, and just dumped it into the mass market. the mentality that "if we throw money at it, we can eventually fix it" is wholly unacceptable when you are talking about a consumer item. yes, the 360 is an awesome system, and I already own almost as many 360 titles as I bought for my original Xbox's entire lifespan, but we as customers shouldn't be doing their stress testing for the machine.
let's hope for the Xbox 480 or 720 or whatever the hell they choose to call it, they do a little more work making sure that the hardware is ready.
As a source, it's pretty shoddy. The reason that the XBox consoles failed was because of Managers? That makes no sense to me.
The idea that the failure rate is that high (which is corroborated by the $1B hit that Microsoft took for the warranty extension) is just crazy! I've gone through 5 X360 consoles myself (two RROD, two optical drive lockups).
But you know what? It's really my favorite console i've owned. I wonder (maybe hope?) that'll change when I can finally track down a Wii (and eventually buy a PS3).
I've been thinking about getting an XBox 360 lately so that I can play a few of the games that look really cool, but reports like this make me want to wait until there is finally a reliable machine released. It's a shame, too, because even though I'm only one person, here is a gamer heart torn and a wallet left full because of bad business practices with Microsoft. I hope that one day, Microsoft decides to take its time and work out the kinks in something before release instead of the current model of "be the first". Then again, as long as consumers are gullible, that may not be considered a "viable business strategy".
I guess I'm one of the lucky ones - never had any problems with my Xbox 360. I don't think it's a launch unit (bought it off of someone else, so I'm not sure when it was originally purchased), but it's definitely not new enough to be one of the "falcon" units or whatever the new ones that aren't supposed to fail as often are called. It does run pretty darn loud but that just seems to be the nature of the machine, and I've never noticed it getting hot or even particularly warm.