- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Complaints of “defects” and rumors of recalls were flooded onto the Internet, and news station
like Fox News ran anti-Xbox 360 articles. It almost seems silly, but when you’re talking about a
multi-billion dollar industry, that is becoming bigger than music and movies, you can see why
Sony is desperate to stomp any competition. This is no different than a political campaign to
Sony, anything goes. I haven’t seen Microsoft attacks or slander Sony once, but this is how
Sony operates and how they sell their systems, by hype and misinformation.
Larry Hryb, the Xbox Live Director of Programming, who runs a weekly audio blog and website
has even noticed and commented on how all these people with “defective” consoles almost
always have no evidence of even owning a console. Xbox Live has gone through a huge upgrade
just recently, which allows anybody to see what you’re doing on your Xbox 360, and what you’
ve done on Live, etc, so when someone says they have the console, but has no Xbox Live
activity, or even an account, it starts to become obvious. Once again, this may seem insane, but
there are thousands of people out there who have an intense hatred of Microsoft and/or the Xbox
brand, and a passionate love for the PlayStation, and will spread anything true or false, if it’ll help
take out the competition. Also, we all know how negative news, whether it’s true or not,
spreads, which is like wildfire. All the casual gamers and just general public hears a quick thing
on the news about the Xbox 360 “melting disks” and soon, it’s a fact to anybody not in the know.
I’ve mentioned the Xbox 360 to people who don’t even play video games, and the first thing they
say is, “Oh, I heard they are having a recall” or something along those lines. Of course with any
system launch there will be a small number of defective consoles, which is less than 3% with the
Xbox 360, but if you looked online, you’d believe it’s somewhere around 30%. You can even
experiment with this in real life. Go to the electronics section of any retail store and ask people
browsing about the system, ask a kid about it, or ask the clerk there even, and I guarantee you,
70% of the time you will get a negative response, and this is why.
Sony knew they couldn’t pull the same thing on Microsoft and the Xbox 360 as they did with
Dreamcast. Sony already knows Microsoft is going to throw out the most anticipated game of
all-time, Halo 3, right around the launch of the PS3 if they can, and there’s no way retailers are
going to turn down all the sales that will garner, just to appease Sony, this is why I was very
pleased with how everything was working out, but I never expected this to happen.
Sony’s new business tactic seems to be to just smear the competition’s name through the mud,
using all their resources, which are massive. They own several news stations and newspapers,
and it’s a very small task to just throw out a few articles about how the Xbox 360 is faulty, etc.
and it’ll spread like crazy when it’s about the hottest item for Christmas. Coinciding with the
news of Xbox 360’s launch, and how they were selling for $1,000 on eBay and everybody
wanted one for Christmas, was the smear campaign by Sony, telling everyone that they wouldn’t
work.
Microsoft has come out and said that the defective systems are very few in numbers, and that if
you have any problems, call 1-800-4MYXBOX, and they will overnight you a box to send them
your Xbox 360, and they will either replace or repair the system, and you will have it back within
5 business days, free of charge. They’re not denying there are some defects, and they are fixing
anything swiftly, much unlike Sony and the PS2, as we went over before, where they were
charging people $100 for a problem they knew about when shipping. Sony also shipped their
portable gaming device, the “PSP” with known defects with the screen, but due to them wanting
to keep the same small size of the system, they shipped them anyway…style over stability it
seems.