Sony denies claim of Xbox 360 style PS3 failure rate on 40gb model
A report appeared on Dutch gaming site ‘Gamed’ which claimed that a Belgian retailer, by the name of ‘Game Mania’ had stated that up to 40% of the new 40GB PS3 they had sold had been returned because of hardware defects. Now Sony have come out to fully deny these rumours.
The original story on Gamed claimed that the defects on the recently released 40gb models of the PS3 left the machine unable to read discs. It was picked up by Kotaku, and posted as a rumour, one which now obviously seems to have been false.
If this claim had actually had any basis in truth, it would have been the biggest gaming news of the year, and could have lead to Sony having the same kind of reliability issues as Microsoft had with the Red Ring of Death. But alas, it seems they are in the clear, as Sony Europe boss David Reeves said in a statement:
“We are very proud of the quality and reliability of PLAYSTATION 3 and are disappointed that such extremely sloppy journalism has resulted in this totally inaccurate story”
“Since launching the 40GB PS3, we have experienced a fantastic jump in sales and the failure rates have remained at the very low level that we not only strive for, but have been achieving since the launch of PS3.â€
That low level of failures is reported to be around 1% or less, so where the 40% figure came from is a mystery. Gamed, the original source of the false allegation has now apologised and replaced the original story with this:
“Yesterday we published a report that the Belgian chain Game Mania has been receiving a large number of defective PS3 40GB consoles back from customers. Today, we received clarification of this information.”
“The statistics that were published on Gamed.nl (namely that 40 per cent of the 40GB machines were defective) appears to be an isolated case. According to Sony and Game Mania, these figures are not representative of the whole region and both parties have requested that the article be amended.”
So PS3 owners can sleep easy tonight, there’s not a problem with the vast majority of Sony consoles, and you’re probably not going to have to send it back to get repaired or replaced like a large number of your Xbox 360 owning chums have. Crisis averted.
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3 Responses to “Sony denies claim of Xbox 360 style PS3 failure rate on 40gb model”
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November 8th, 2007
“But alas, it seems they are in the clear,”
That one line sums up your ignorant anti Sony bias completely.
November 10th, 2007
How do we know they’re in the clear?
After all, MS said that the fairure rate of the 360 was normal for a heck of a long time before they finally admitted there was a problem.
Did Sony ever admit there was a problem with the PS2, even, and its disc read error?
Maybe there is a problem, maybe their’s not. My money is on one bad batch of PS3′s sent out that had a high failure rate. However, its far too soon to make a conclusion on this yet, unless we didn’t learn from MS and the 360 problems.
December 14th, 2007
I have experienced the problem first hand. Have had 5 returned in the last month.