Xbox 360 Red Rings of Death land Microsoft in court

By Davey Winder
Tuesday, 21 October 2008 19:41

Entertainment

This is the story that just will not go away. Microsoft has been sued for violation of consumer protection laws for continuing to sell the Xbox 360 despite being aware the hardware is (allegedly) likely to suffer the Red Rings of Death and fail.

I can safely remove the allegedly from this paragraph as I know only too well how fragile the Xbox 360 can be, having purchased an Xbox 360 Elite model soon after launch only to encounter the Red Rings of Death myself within the year.

Unfortunately for me, things got a lot worse before they got better, although I did eventually end up with a working Xbox 360 once more.

Although many readers, mainly Xbox 'Fanbois' I suspect, belittled me for bothering to write about such problems as Microsoft repaired the console free of charge, I am glad to see that I am not alone in thinking that a product should be truly 'fit for purpose' if it stays on sale.

A Californian woman called Reshelle Cable would certainly appear to agree with this line of thinking. She has sued Microsoft in the Sacramento County Superior Court, accusing the company of deceiving consumers regarding the high failure rate of the games console.

Her lawsuit alleges that Microsoft has continued to retail the Xbox 360 despite knowing full well that hardware problems, known as the Red Rings of Death, are likely to cause it to fail. Cable says that the rush to market of the Xbox 360 "was detrimental to consumers" as it "suffered from numerous hardware defects."

Microsoft cannot deny that the console has a problem, after all it has extended the warranty on all units to cover the general hardware failure indicated by those three flashing red lights for a full three years.

One thing that Microsoft will not do, however, is come clean with the exact size of the problem, although some analysts estimate this to possibly be as high as 15 percent.

While I only got UKP £10 worth of Xbox LIVE credits in compensation for my RRoD troubles Cable wants a little more. She wants not only her money back, but is seeking that Microsoft divide up the Xbox 360 profits and share them out to disgruntled owners by way of a refund.