GDC demo kiosk Xbox 360 suffers Red Ring of Death

The Red Ring of Death problem on Xbox 360s is over isn’t it? Well, Microsoft would have you believe so, to make sure it doesn’t lose any more ground against the PS3 and Wii, but unfortunately the evidence on very public display suggests otherwise.

All of the big companies are currently showing off their wares at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, but it seems Microsoft seem determined to show the bad side of their hardware as well as the good.

Darren Waters, editor of dot.life, the BBC News technology blog, was wondering around Microsoft’s stands at the event, and in amongst people trying out games on demo consoles, was an Xbox 360 suffering from the dreaded, and supposedly cured Red Ring of Death.

Waters did what any self respecting technology blogger would do, and instead of informing someone in charge of the stand, videoed the evidence, and embedded it via Blip.tv on the site. Here is the footage he filmed:

Oops, that’s not a good piece of marketing, either for those industry people attending the conference, or those of us in the wider world, now that the footage is out to all and sundry.

As Waters himself says,

“There’s no way of knowing if this particular console was manufactured before or after Microsoft identified the problems with the machines.”

“But at the very least it’s embarrassing for the company that its own stock of demo machines are still susceptible to the problem.”

Embarrassing is putting it mildly, and more worrying could this mean that the problem hasn’t been entirely solved at all?

Remember that this is the problem deemed so serious, and unspinnable, that Microsoft has committed to spending upwards of $1 billion to fix it.

And now that it’s even affecting the company’s own demo machines, there’s no chance of hiding the fact that the failure rate of Xbox 360s is still much higher than rivals Wii and Playstation 3. Maybe this is one of the reason Xbox sales are falling, while the other two machines are enjoying a healthy increase?

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