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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?
Blaming the game in such cases is stupid; but blaming the hardware or firmware isn't.
A computer shouldn't be expected to operate at full performance under all conditions; but failure to throttle clocks on high power silicon or halt gracefully before suffering hardware damage is pretty shoddy work; doubly so in something like a console or laptop, where the manufacturer has full control of every component, thermal sensor, fan, and airflow path inside the chassis.
... I'll let you come over and play with my Wii.
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BMO
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.
The discs are still dual-layer DVDs, but the new "format" is a different partition scheme that opens up an extra gig of space for game data, at the expense of space that was dedicated for some other purpose. That seems like it should be a pretty minor change, so the rest of the update probably slips in other changes such as DRM.
The theory on why this is requiring a hardware replacement for some users is that this forces a flash of the dvd drive firmware. Some revisions have a dvd drive that is incapable of being flashed, so the firmware may be causing those revisions to be unable to read disks.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"