Corporate vice president of Xbox Peter Moore -- whom I've known since he was flogging Dreamcasts for Sega -- has been talking to the games mags about the hot Xbox 360 console problem. He seems to have talked to Gamespot, Wired News, GamesIndustry.biz, 1Up, Kotaku and no doubt others. And as I posted last night, he also did a blogcast with Major Nelson.
Moore does a lot of apologising, but not much useful stuff emerges. A couple of atoms of info from Gamespot are that problems are not related to specific software (it's nor Forza 2) and that the Elite version has been affected less than the Core and Pro.
Moore won't be drawn on the failure rate. GamesIndustry.biz says: "I was just trying to figure out, is a 10 per cent failure rate acceptable? 15 per cent?" and Moore replies: "You know it when you see it. We saw it, and it was unacceptable, and we got after it."
Moore says:
So, you know, over the past few weeks and months we've been seeing enough information and gathering information... This is not something we just decided to do on Monday.
We wanted to make sure we gathered the right amount of data. We made sure that we could put fixes in, plus equally importantly, made sure that we gathered all of the costs.
As you can see, it is not an inconsequential amount of money. And so, you need to make sure you do it once and you do it right. You don't want to keep coming back every quarter saying 'Oh, there's more money that we didn't identify' so we're making sure we're covering all of the costs as well as covering any costs we're about to incur.
