In Modern Systems

So, the Xbox 360 launch was a success, right? Turns out the jury is still out—and early reports the morning after are not pretty.

From unconfirmed rumors of near-riots as employees apparently hoarded Xbox 360 systems in front of waiting customers, to numbers of pre-orders that went unfulfilled, some are saying Microsoft mishandled the launch.

But those who actually got the system in hand are breathing easy and living it up, right?

Some of them are. But others are posting a plethoral of problems with their brand-new 360s, from game crashes to hard drives that simply don't work.

One reasonable gamer lays it out like this: "Between my friends and I, we bought six machines at the Zero Hour event. Of the six, my machine has a dead hard drive, another machine is working but is rather flaky (seen some strange behavior—the drive may also be scratching discs, as my friend's copy of Condemned is now unplayably scratched, but we don't know if the drive caused it—the machine has also had problems booting games and being turned off...), one seems to be good, and I haven't heard yet about the status of the other three."

Is there enough evidence to shout "recall"?

While there are plenty of stories in the games press and blogging scene this morning, many of them seem centered on one fellow's experience—a poster called "Jsgongwon" on the Xbox-Scene forums who included pictures of his crash, which apparently happened repeatedly during Project Gotham Racing 3.

"So far haven't been able to play one track without crashing ... also got this crashing on Xbox Live screen and on startup too ..." he writes.

Source:

Too bad for all the guys who paid double the price on eBay and got defective consoles. No pity from me for those.
Microsoft pushed their console out without regard to the quality.

I am happy to see Nintendo isn't doing the same as MS.

You can't tell until it's out.
Although I don't think there will be problems with Nintendo's new console I'll wait until it's out and see.

Ah, good ol' blind faith.

and to clear things up, this isn't an epidemic, like all of the news sites that are completely unrelated to video games are making it out to be.

There are 5 or 6 360 demo kiosks in my town, all of which I've spent extenisive amounts of time playing and investigating. All but one have the rear of the unit enclosed more than I would think is healthy, and they have yet to crash.

Also, the probelms are reported to stem from the external POWer Supply. which I can promise you MicroSoft is going to replace.

As for the disc scratching, MS will repair/replace those consoles free of charge, as well as the games. This is obvious. Please don't act as if MS is pulling a Sony and saying "We have no idea what you're talking about, now if you'll excuse us, we have to go count your money".

I do think the console was released prematurely, but the faulty ones will be replaced, and the problem remedied for future releases.

These problems are no worse than what's STILL going on with the PS2, 5 years after it was released.

Yeah, there was some douchebag on MCTV news yesterday, complaining about his xbox, and that he got a red flashing LED when he turned his console on.

Also, the probelms are reported to stem from the external POWer Supply. which I can promise you MicroSoft is going to replace.
As for the disc scratching, MS will repair/replace those consoles free of charge, as well as the games...

And basically the customers have a right to have their stuff replaced. They pulled out big money to buy functioning hard- and software.

You cannot judge a console because of the problems it has at first. From what I've seen many consoles have problems their first revision. It isn't fair to judge the entire system because of a few of the consoles having problems.

No doubt that the 360 was realeased too early, a few months is not nearly enough to perfect a system, but atleast MS is offering to replace the deffective consoles. Much more than our good friend Sony did.

Now I'm curious, what is it exactly that MS is doing that Nintendo isn't? I'm not saying that Nintendo sucks by not having the Revolution out yet or anything, I actually am curious.

Now I'm curious, what is it exactly that MS is doing that Nintendo isn't? I'm not saying that Nintendo sucks by not having the Revolution out yet or anything, I actually am curious.
Making peice of shit consoles that don't work.

What about making posts that don't add anything to a discussion?

Sure, there have been some reports about the 360 crashing... Did you know that Nintendo lost TONS of money in Japan when they released the first Famicom? I personally favor Nintendo over other companies when it comes to systems, but facts are facts... this kind of thing happens.

It seems that the disc-scratching issue is due to people placing the console vertically, and it recieveing a bump, or a nudge. obviously something that does need to be corrected, but it's not entirely the fault of MS.

What about making posts that don't add anything to a discussion?

What about it?
I figure they should do extensive tests to make sure such big problems don't occur, if they are happening so much, how could they have not noticed that when they were testing the final product? Well I'm sure they will replace and refund everything, but it just a hassle.

I guess they just assumed people would ventelate the systems properly and not bash them around when they were on. But one shouldn't assume those kinds of things. For sure, they should have caught those problems.

I'm somehow willing to bet that some of the "defectiveness" is from human stupidity. Kids probably slamming the cd tray (making the tray mis alligned) or maybe some moron putting thier system directly on top of a sub woofer (huge vibrations, probably not so good).
When I got one of the first PS2's shipped out it had a few issues. Sometimes it would spin forever and say I didn't put a disk in there, ect. I was grumbling about about what a pile of crap it was, but then realized that is the price you pay for wanting something before everyone else.

You'd be amazed how dumb the average consumer is. My mom refuses to leave her laptop charging unnatended because "hackers can get into it" Did I mention she bought a celeron-based laptop? I've seen others keep their ps2s rammed up against the walls and idle for good amounts of time.

i was flipping through the channels earlier today, and came across some CNN news show, they were talking about the Xbox 360 and how MS is losing alot of money on the things. it costs them about $500 to make one, and they're selling them for $399

What's worse, that's just the cost of components, not R&D time, or anything, the XBox division has been a huge money hole so far.

But in my opinion, the features of the 360, such as the Xbox Live Marketplace, and the fact that Xbox Live Silver is free to everyone who owns a 360 is fantastic. No more begging at the local EB for demo discs, no more buying $15 magazines just for the demo. just download 'em and enjoy.

so the 360 will make money eventually, MS actually owns the chips this time, so costs can go down, and they can have other's make them, this wasn't the case with the Xbox, there was no possible way MS could have anyone else make the chips, so there was no competition for the Contract, the manufacturers they used charged stupid amounts of money, and if MS wanted the Xbox to stay alive, they had to keep paying it.

What's worse, that's just the cost of components, not R&D time, or anything, the XBox division has been a huge money hole so far.

But in my opinion, the features of the 360, such as the Xbox Live Marketplace, and the fact that Xbox Live Silver is free to everyone who owns a 360 is fantastic. No more begging at the local EB for demo discs, no more buying $15 magazines just for the demo. just download 'em and enjoy.

so the 360 will make money eventually, MS actually owns the chips this time, so costs can go down, and they can have other's make them, this wasn't the case with the Xbox, there was no possible way MS could have anyone else make the chips, so there was no competition for the Contract, the manufacturers they used charged stupid amounts of money, and if MS wanted the Xbox to stay alive, they had to keep paying it.I heard that the PS3 might cost up to $600 a piece to produce so can they afford to sell 10 million units by Holiday 2006 at a $200 loss per console? Sure Sony is a huge company they can handle the losses but they're going to be hurting themselves substantially especially now that they're not market leaders in the television or audio markets anymore i see a very rough year for sony.

if they want to stay competitive in terms of price, a whole lot more...

Blu-Ray drive, Cell CPU... those cost more than a DVD drive, and a (basically) standard POWerPC G5 CPU.

if they want to stay competitive in terms of price, a whole lot more...

Blu-Ray drive, Cell CPU... those cost more than a DVD drive, and a (basically) standard POWerPC G5 CPU.Competition is good. Especially for us, the gamers.We essentially come out of this with over $300 worth of free high-end electronics.

Disc scratching explained.

This is why you don't blindly follow everything you read online.

all of those morons who are screaming "OMG TEH XBAWCKS SCATCHED MY DISKCSKSZ!!1!!1onehundredandeleven!!!111!!" are the same morons that are moving the console around with discs spinning in it.

http://www.llamma.com/xbox360/news/Xbox-360-Game-Disc-Scratched.htm

!!!1



On another note, my cousin got a XBOX 360 (the full 499$ system lucky b*tch...) and he hasn't had any proplems yet...

http://www.llamma.com/xbox360/news/Xbox-360-Game-Disc-Scratched.htm

!!!1



On another note, my cousin got a XBOX 360 (the full 499$ system

What's so lucky about people buying stuff for approx. 500$???

Moving around consoles with the disc spinning is not a good idea...

That is a really stupid idea (to move it around with the disc spinning). I know as i've had a lot of them.

I've made a career out of making frivolous posts. As for the 360, the only problem that I've paid attention to is the Black Screen of Death. I dismissed most of the other problems as consumer error (though I worried about potential disk scratching).

Besides, it's like NES-Luke said, they're willing to replace defective consoles. This is the first release, things go wrong. At least Microsoft is apologetic about it (which I did not expect them to be).