Rockstar has issued a joint statement with Sony, denying that either the game LA Noire or the PlayStation 3 firmware update 3.61 are responsible for the technical issues that have caused problems for a minority of console owners.
On Thursday, posts on the Rockstar support pages and on other games forums indicated that buyers of LA Noire were finding copies of their game freezing up during play on both the Xbox 360 and PS3 consoles.
Originally, staff on Rockstar's customer support forums suggested that the problem may lie with the new PlayStation firmware update, but then Xbox owners reported similar problems. 24 hours later, and according to Rockstar as well as Sony and several industry news sources, incidences have remained low. The publisher's QA staff have allegedly been unable to replicate the errors.
So what's going on? It could be that the failure rate of consoles remains at a fairly level and low rate, but that, when a major release arrives, the numbers of customers experiencing technical issues naturally rises – with the game itself appearing to be the culprit.
"L.A. Noire is one of the biggest releases of the year, and understandably there's a huge number of people playing it," says Chris Dring of industry newspaper MCV. "Now, as games consoles break and malfunction every day, some are going to find that there machines die whilst playing the game, and if it has happened to someone else on a forum, then they might incorrectly make the link between the game and the console breakdown."
LA Noire launched in Europe on Friday and the UK game sites I have spoken to have not reported any complaints from readers. Rockstar is suggesting that if anyone does experience problems they should head to the publisher's support site.
