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Firmware Troubles For Old Xbox 360s, Possibly PS3s As Well
Several readers have tipped news of firmware updates causing problems for both Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. The Xbox issue was caused by a recent update thought to be preparing the platform for a new disc format that gives developers another 1GB or so of space to work with. As it turns out, the real purpose seems to be piracy countermeasures. Microsoft acknowledged the issue and promised that affected users would receive a new 360S console and a free year of Xbox Live to compensate. The PS3 problem was highlighted by reports of overheating consoles while playing L.A. Noire on the recently-released 3.61 firmware. Rockstar Games initially confirmed that the firmware was causing the overheating, but later backtracked. They issued a joint statement with Sony saying that neither the game nor the firmware was the culprit, leaving users wondering what else it could be.
http://majornelson.com/2011/05/18/clearing-up-some-confusion/ The new update is not what is causing the problem it was a previous update. It also explains this at the bottom of the gamasutra article
Rockstar Games initially confirmed that the firmware was causing the overheating, but later backtracked. They issued a joint statement with Sony
So, Sony talked to them nicely, convinced them with irrefutable logic that neither the game nor the firmware was the problem, and they skipped happily, hand-in-hand to the podium to announce it jointly. Sony would never be so evil as to threaten Rockstar Games with new firmware that prevents all Rockstar Games' games from working at all.
...but this is how you do customer service.
Microsoft acknowledged the issue and promised that affected users would receive a new 360S console and a free year of Xbox Live to compensate.
Acknowledge the problem, fix it (or replace it in this case with a superior model), and give compensation.
No nonsense customer service, and it gives gives them good PR.
Compare that to Sony...
There are millions of game consoles out there - millions - and yet there aren't very many revisions of hardware per model. It's not hard for the manufacturers to test how these required updates are going to affect their hardware. But here we are again, a story about revisions of two major consoles having serious issues with a firmware update.
These required updates are ridiculous. We wouldn't put up with having to take our cars back to the dealer to have required maintenance done that would take away some feature or option we paid for, let alone having the maintenance leave the car in a troubled or non-working state.
There needs to be some sort of consumer protection to prevent these types of things. What's next, an update for our phones that prevents us from dialing 800 numbers because they are costing corporations too much money when we call?
Why, hackers, of course!
It would be funny if it was true.
Every single new major game has reports of people saying it overheated their PS3 and bricked it. Every single one.
I would be -surprised- if this one didn't.
As for MS, good for them. I think it's time to pull my old 360 out of the closet and update it in hopes of getting an even newer 360. :D
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Whether the culprit is the PS3 or the game itself, if the one-year warranty is expired, you're SOL. Just ask anybody who's gotten a Yellow Light of Death (either by defective firmware or defective solder).
The repair fee is $149. Hope you spent that PSN downtime earning some extra cash!
How do you add additional capacity like that? If the drive could always read the higher density disks, why didn't they use them in the first place? Surely it's not that the manufacturing process is more expensive and they only just now figured out how to make it affordable.
Is there any grain of truth to this or is it pure BS cover for the piracy stuff?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
... I'll let you come over and play with my Wii.
--
BMO
This would not be a problem for Rockstar if they had developed this title for the PC platform. Gaming PCs have much better ventilation than consoles.
I would argue that this is exactly the type of game that PC gamers would love, so it would have made a natural home for the title. (As you can guess, I'm rather miffed at not being able to play this one.)
To the best of my knowledge, Wii lacks anything comparable to XNA Game Studio, App Hub (formerly XNA Creators Club), or Xbox Live Indie Games.
Last time a customer had a Windows activation problem, Microsoft told us "Yeah, that happens, we know about it, and we have no plans to fix it. Reinstall."
They definitely give a fuck about their customers.
Or at least, their customer's wallets.
Acknowledgment or not, MS needs to stop futzing around with the DVD drive and just design a new generation console with a blu-ray drive. They're still limping along with an increasingly obsolete DVD drive (becoming more and more problematic on newer games like L.A. Noire) because they're too proud to pay Sony royalty rights for blu-ray and because they've been so focused on their Wii knockoff Kinect add-on. So, here we are at the end of the traditional 5-year console lifespan, and they don't even have a new console on the horizon. And now they're trying to squeeze more life out of their aging console with a software fix that breaks a lot of their older versions (and which will only add one lousy gig to the disc capacity anyway).
Bad move, MS. You used to have the definitive lead (in the U.S. anyway), and could have secured it by sticking to the traditional 5-year life cycle. But now Sony (and even Nintendo now) is catching up and preparing to pass. And you're just standing still.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
As others have noted, LA Noire overheating is also happening on xbox 360. Notice that in both cases it's older consoles? What's the game that a high percentage of people are playing now? So the big new game is what people happen to be playing on their dusty old hardware which is overheating. Same thing will happen next year with the big game and the older consoles around then. Anyway, it's the simplest explanation at this point.
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this is why pc is my main plataform, I buy only the exclusives games for ps3
I bought a Japanese 20GB PS3 nearly day one off eBay and its been working like a champ ever since. I recently bought a used US 20GB PS3, and it worked fine long enough to download an update, brick itself with a YLOD, and I had to send it into Sony for $129. It would be nice to have some way to know if the firmware update will cause the console to be bricked, and have some option to recover the console myself, but what will I do about it? Not much.
My NES doesn't overheat at all while playing Duck Hunt on my CRT TV...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Sounds like a smokeout to me. Some older hacked Xboxes are invulnerable to M$'s new anti-piracy countermeasures, so they make a firmware upgrade that totally breaks the DVD drive. Replace the broken Xboxes with new ones. Now they don't have to worry about old hardware that they can't control...
All drive types are compatible, including Samsung, Benq and Hitachi drives. All of them will be able to play XGD3 after taking the update. Sorry, people - no free 360 S just because you got an old console. (And along the lines, it seems that AP25 is STILL not supported after the update on these drives. And: the additional 1GB, as game developers confirmed, can be used for CONTENT, not for anti-piracy measures. The only added anti-piracy measure is that with the additional 1GB the game will be too big to fit onto a DVD-R DL disc.)
The real issue is that during the PREVIOUS update (the one that added Kinect support) some consoles haven't been updated correctly in a way that they would start fail only after the NEXT update (the one that flashes the drives) is applied. It could be any other update - it's definitely not related to the XGD3 support.
Affected customers that are using LIVE have been identified and got a letter. Not sure what happens to non-LIVE users, I guess if you call support, they'll tell you if you're eligible if you describe the correct symptom (and the symptom will be verified in the repair center - yes, they do that before they send you a replacement console).
Sorry to spoil the fun, though.
Your comment seems biased.
Remember, Sony introduced Move at the same time MS introduced Kinect. They're not dicking around with it quite as much, simply due to it being much less popular. And Nintendo isn't catching up with the 360; Nintendo dominated Sony and MS this gen, and neither of them will ever catch up. Maybe they will next gen.
And the DVD format honestly seems to be causing no problem. At most, some of the big games need split into 2-3 disks... and nobody cares. Swapping a disk every ten hours of gameplay doesn't bother anybody.
Barring people with "fungus" in their name, I doubt a lot of people have "monstrous 70's tube amp[s]".
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
Aren't PS3s (or their graphics chips) really good at floating point operations? Seems like the perfect type of botnet for brute force decryption jobs.
What is it with you PC snobs anyway? When a PC exclusive title comes out, you don't see scores of console gamers spamming the game's message boards complaining that it isn't coming to consoles
You mean comments like "I don't think my computer could run this. Here's hoping for a console version." and "Man, this looks pretty awesome. I hope it comes out on consoles." which I just pulled out from a thread under a video of The Witcher 2 which just came out?
I could probably mine places like Gametrailers, G4 and IGN for more of that, but I think I've proven my point.
The rest of your 'analysis' if wrong also, but that's another story.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
MS released the HD-DVD drive before. I don't see why they couldn't release a Bluray version of the same thing. Well....any technical reason. It would certainly be easier than releasing a new console.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I have noticed that after having applied 3.61, the PS3 is running it's fan at a noticeable higher level than with the previous firmwares, regardless of the task.
Who cares about customer service at this point?
How long have the PS3 and 360's been around? How long have they been doing continued firmware management on them? With as much money as these companies are making, and as long as they've these devices have been available, they still can't manage to properly put out firmware that isn't buggy? They don't have their hardware and software mapped to the bit?
Hardware production inconsistencies aside, these problems are plainly not acceptable from the modern tech. giants that Sony and MS are. I expect more from tech. companies that ave been around for decades and been pioneers across various fronts. Why so many consumers continue to accept this mediocrity because its all that's available baffles me. Bluntly, consumers should be expecting more value for their money. Why Sony and MS aren't providing better value out of pride or for their name, is another matter to be discussed.
I would've liked to have seen the Blu-Ray drive for the 360; but frankly it seems that MS prefers streaming content instead so I'm not holding my breath on seeing that Blu-Ray drive.
Bad move, MS. You used to have the definitive lead (in the U.S. anyway), and could have secured it by sticking to the traditional 5-year life cycle. But now Sony (and even Nintendo now) is catching up and preparing to pass. And you're just standing still.
Nintendo broke the cycle by releasing the Wii well ahead of MS and Sony, and I've yet to hear anything about the Playstation 4. While the continued use of DVD in the Xbox 360 is limiting developers, there are still plenty of games coming out that fit on one DVD. Aside from Lost Odyssey, Final Fantasy XIII and L.A. Noire, I can't think of another Xbox 360 game that needed more than 1 DVD disc.
Besides the disc space issue, I'm hard pressed to find reasons for MS to release a new console. It already does 1080p, and some games even do 3D if you've got the external hardware for it (TV, glasses etc).
MS is hardly standing still either - they are still expanding the services being offered by Xbox Live, which I would say is the biggest draw for the console. Sony's online service is a mess (not just security-wise), and Nintendo's is practically non-existent.
I am the proud owner of two 60GB fat PS3's. I bought them for the express purpose of running Linux and learning more about the Cell processor. I believe I have read that newer PS3's have been cheapened to the point where they cannot run Linux, firmware notwithstanding. I am thinking that this new firmware release that allegedly causes overheating and shutdown, could be an attempt to literally burn up these early collector's items. It has been several years since my PS3's were on the Internet communicating with Sony's network. I waited impatiently for years for their SL knockoff to arrive, and I finally just lost interest. For some reason one of my two unts has decided it doesn't want to play Bluray disks any more. This is probably the result of DRM issues. Even though it was in warrantee, I cannot send in the unit as they would undoubtedly update the firmware to the current version and my Linux would be hosed. I have am not clever enough to use geohot's package of secrets to unlock the PS'3 hypervisor security. I wish someone would develop a new set of PROMS (or whatever) that would dispense with the Sony GUI and hypervisor, and just allow a distribution of Linux to own the machine. Then I could do what I wanted which was to learn about the Cell, in a less memory restricted fashion. An after-market memory(ram) enhancement would be nice too.
I don't know why they didn't just stick with the HD-DVD format. Just because it's dead for everything else doesn't mean they couldn't still use it on their console for games. If anything, HD-DVD's increasing obscurity would help them combat piracy.