Asgard Designs

The Annus Horribilis for Sony

There isn’t a tech company more hated by the hacker community than Sony it seems, a string of major security breaches – first the PSN hack which exposed millions of users personal information. Following that Qriocity suffered the same, racking up 77 million accounts compromised. The latest word is that the 3.61 firmware update for ps3 is overheating older consoles, and a rep from inside Rockstar announced that during testing their new game LA Noire they have noticed older ‘fat’ PS3 60GB and 80GB models shutting themselves down after as little as 30 minutes play. This has only been noticed on the consoles running 3.61 and on multiple (rockstar and non rockstar) games.

“At this time we are recommending contacting Sony directly to report the overheating issue. However, this is not the end of our support; we are continuing to test L.A. Noire on all firmware versions and hardware models to isolate the issues and see what can be done. As always, we will update this article as soon as we have updates.”

The article has subsequently disappeared and rockstar have published the usual boilerplate (most probably co-written by the Sony legal team) claiming there was no problem and the representatives opinion did not reflect that of Rockstar.

On one hand, the fact is, these consoles are pretty old, and due to regulations around the lead content of solder, they just don’t last like the older consoles as the lead free solder is known to be brittle. Coupled with the alarmist nature of many outspoken internet denizens who tend to look for a conspiracy under every stone, means things like this very quickly get blown out of proportion. The update features changelog seems to indicate all changes are solely security related so you’d think that it would have little impact on the system.

On the other, Sony, and in particular, their playstations have had a very sketchy build quality history. At last count I believe I went through 4 PS1 consoles (luckily all within warranty) with the last one still chugging along last I heard, being donated to a cousin. I also remember how prone the PSone slim consoles were to overheating after a couple of hours of play too. I’d like to see Sony produce some proof, or a rational, honest dissection of the rumours rather than legalese boilerplate.

I’ve found my 60GB PS3 has been hanging, lagging and running hot since the update. While that could well be coincidence, taking into account my experience with Sony and their build quality, I’m inclined to believe the Rockstar rep was onto something. Covering up something like this is going to just exacerbate customers distrust of the company and while I’m sure they want to avoid any further bad press, covering it up with ‘no comment’ or, even worse ‘everything is fine’ press releases can only be bad.