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Sony Sued Over Bricked PS3s
Zarrot writes "If Sony's recent 3.00 PS3 firmware update bricked your console, you may now have legal recourse thanks to a class action suit against Sony. The complaint alleges that thousands of users (PDF) were affected by the update, and in some cases the PS3 hardware itself was damaged. It continues, 'For owners who sustained hardware damage from the Sony-required update, Sony is charging a $150 repair fee per unit. Sony, responding to the numerous complaints about the unacceptable effects of the defective update, released a further, optional update that it claimed "improves system stability" — yet performance problems continued, and the new update did nothing to remedy the systems of users who sustained hardware damage."'"
Never ascribe to incompetence that which can be explained by greedy self-interest. Is it possible that this was deliberate? After all, they deliberately rooted thousands of PCs (inclusing mine) a few years ago, so you KNOW they're evil even by corporate standards, and they're charging $150 to fix a problem that their "update" caused.
They won't brick MY PS3, because there's no way in hell I'll buy another product from the company that rooted my computer with a trojan in a music CD. Why do people keep buying stuff from this company? I won't -- once bitten, twice shy. Buy from Sony and you're asking to get screwed, with sand as lube.
Free Martian Whores!
So now Nintendo and Sony have both managed to brick consoles with firmware updates. Great.
Sorry, fellas. YOU broke it, YOU don't get to bill US to fix your mistakes.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't think these are really "bricked" consoles, are they? They boot, but they malfunction. That's not "bricking" anything.
Sony is REPEATEDLY caught doing nefarious things. Rootkits on a CD. Deleting 2/3rds of a MMO (The Star Wars Galaxies NGE) the day after selling an expansion for it, which included features marketed that applied to the 2/3rds that got deleted. They've gotten caught multiple times price fixing CDs. They have released a version of the PSP, called the PSPGo that requires you to repurchase all your games. They've also been caught deploying astroturfers and viral marketers to fake reviews and artificially pump their products.
They also run what I believe is an illegal international lottery with respect to their "trading" card games in their MMOs.
So why would it surprise anyone that Sony, not exactly well known for the quality of their coding work (if SOE is representative of it) would release a buggy firmware that destroys hardware and then make people pay $150 to fix their own defect?
Sony is all about revenue streams! Stealing from their customers is just yet another one of those.
This suit is going to cost them millions and will no doubt harm their reputation even more than all of the above have. Sony must not care about their reputation, since they do nothing at all constructive to improve it. Hint: repeatedly assfucking your customers does NOT a good reputation make.
Corporatism != Free Market
If you think about it, wouldn't it hurt Sony more if everyone that was harmed by Sony's "update" took them to small claims court? They'd have to send a lawyer & in some jurisdictions, they'd actually have to send an officer of the company. If no one shows up, they lose by default. Class action lawsuits are there to make things easier on the legal system & on lawyers, but you know what? Screw both of them.
There is a war going on for your mind.
That can happen to anybody - all vendors have some lemons. The question is, how many and how do they handle it when they sold you something with a problem? A good vendor will take care of it to the best of their ability and leave you with as little problems as possible - a bad vendor will ignore you.
I got an outdated DPT RAID controller from a friend a decade ago. It had problems cooperating with my BIOS - it would only boot correctly (exactly) every second time, or something like that. Not something that was a big deal to me, and the card was about five years old at that time (and I was not the original owner). However, I sent them an email to just ask if they had a solution. They immediately (as in same day, and without me asking for it) sent me new firmware chips by Fedex. Shipping came to $70 - more than the card was worth on the second hand market.
I've had other vendors that have driven out in the middle of the night with replacement servers when I suspected that there was a problem with one of the servers they'd delivered.
It's not the failure - it's the failure to handle the failure.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
After all that, if they win, every customer will get their machine fixes for free but with a 4-6 week turn around time, they customer will still have to pay $20-$35 for shipping the borked machine back, and get a nice voucher for $35 to reimburse the shipping cost usable in the Playstation Online store. Meanwhile the lawyers will get a multi-million dollar paycheck out of the victory.
Sony - 0
Consumer - 1
Lawyers - 10
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Great -- so affected users have a shot at getting a check for like, eight dollars in acouple of years while some lawyer gets rich. Gotta love that...
Caveat Utilitor
Why do all the +5 Insightful comments have NOTHING to do with the article? Just "DONT BUY SONY THEYRE TEH EVILZ!" This is as bad as it used to be with Microsoft articles back in the day.
To all of the DONT BUY SONY CUZ THEYRE TEH EVILZ can you recommend me which game console to buy? Oh and please don't say PC, I game hours a day on my PC but I also like having a console for the console only games. Please tell me which console is not made by an evil corporation and doesn't brick with firmware upgrades? The ROCK SOLID 360? The Wii and it's recent hardware killing firmware too? Guess what, I'm going to buy the console that has the games I want. For me that's the PS3 and soon the Wii.
For the record my PS3, and the PS3's of my friends (yes, I know others with them) haven't bricked, so this is far from a EVERYONES PS3 JUST DIED that some people like to make it out to be. Saying don't buy a PS3 because SoE sucks or they released a rootkit 4 years ago is up there with saying don't buy Microsoft because Bob sucked or because they killed Netscape. Pretty much EVERY major corporation has done something evil.
Feel free to mod me down, I got some Karma to burn.
Honesty dude, it's bad enough when you blame the OP for something like that, when if in fact your definition was correct, we would not have terms like "de-bricking" flying around in IT-land when speaking of fixing wifi routers and the like.
Read my subject line.
As a software engineer, I feel some sympathy for those who release patches for desktop computer OSes. A computer is a general-purpose device that is intended to allow users to install third-party applications that have full access to a huge API; to install applications like antivirus utilities that dig deep into the OS; and add hardware and the low-level drivers that go with them. The OS update is applied to an environment that may have wandered far from its starting point. Every customer has a unique configuration that probably has meaningful differences from any box in the SQA department.
But a game console? A game console is a walled garden, the applications need only a circumscribed set of functions, the vendor has total control over what goes on it, and nobody is adding third-party hardware to it.
Sony should be ashamed of itself, and should have volunteered to fix damaged systems for free--long before anyone complained.
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