Source details Xbox 360 design flaws, Red Ring of Death

The same site that reported the impending split between Bungie and Microsoft a full week before the official press release has now posted an in-depth interview with an anonymous member of the Xbox 360 development team. 8Bit Joystick posted the interview yesterday (January 19, 2007) in an e-mail question-and-answer format. Lengthy and technical responses to questions posed by “Jake,” the post’s author, seem to confirm that the inside source is legitimate and well informed. When asked about the estimated 30% failure rate of the Xbox 360:

It’s around 30%, and all will probably fail early. This quarter they are expecting 1 M failures, most of those Xenons. Some of those are repeat failures. Life expectancy is all over the map because the design has very little margin for most of the important parameters. That means it’s not a fault tolerant design. So a good unit may last a couple of years, while a bad unit can fail in hours. I have a launch unit and have not had a single problem with it. And it’s used a lot. But I don’t know anyone else with a 360 that hasn’t broken, except you now. There’s no way to tell when yours might die. But the cooler you can keep it, the longer it will probably last. So stand it up, keep it in free air, etc. :Note : Xenon was the code name for the first Xbox 360 mother board.

The interview is a full twenty questions, nearly all of which receive succinct, intelligent responses. The answers have the tone of an underpaid and overqualified engineer who clearly sees the mistakes top brass are making but is powerless to stop them. Among her (we’ll just guess it’s a woman) more astute observations is this one regarding the overall mission of Microsoft and losses so far:

Xbox’s mission statement is to preserve the Windows monopoly and extend it into the living room, as a media extender for a Media Center PC, along with a host of other MS and other company’s hardware devices that fit into a digital entertainment lifestyle. MS has the bucks to keep losing money on Xbox for a long time, maybe forever. They’ve already lost around 6 billion dollars. How are they ever going to make that back on Xbox? They can’t. Maybe they don’t think they have to. That amount might be just 1 or 2 quarters of profit for an integrated hw/sw portfolio, with windows, PC Hardware, Xbox, Zune, TV, Movies, ads, etc., all providing some revenue stream to MS. You should check out their jobs site sometime. You can learn a lot about what they are doing. And their patent applications. They have a team working on making PCs now. That voice activated thing they did for Ford? Where do you think you will see that next? MS devices and sw is my guess.

Someone who knows the ins and outs of the game, apparently. The knowledge that my 360 was not, in fact, arduously produced with the pure, crystal clear intent of providing maximum gaming enjoyment for fans of gaming is hardly a shock.

Commercialism? You don’t say. But it becomes apparent after reading this interview that Microsoft’s foray into the console War has been, all along, a carefully calculated attempt to garner more customers into the great Windows fold. This makes me uneasy.

I’m forcibly reminded of City 17 from the venerable Half-Life series, a game I’m thoroughly enjoying in its Orange Box reincarnation. When phrases like “integrated hw/sw portfolios” are bandied about like cheap trinkets, one tends to forget that what it actually means is Big Brother and the Combine and @$*!-ing robots watching you when you go to take dump. The idea of having one company make all of the hardware and software in your house should give you a case of the screaming heebie-jeebies, especially if it’s going to have a 30% failure rate.

And yet, the Xbox enjoyed incredible popularity last year and garnered a good deal of profit for Microsoft and many other companies as well. No, the quality of service isn’t always there and Halo 3 players can be some of the rudest !##-holes on the planet, but the 360 is fun. Opinion that may be, but you know it’s true. Perhaps Microsoft’s plans will go astray and they will be the catalyst for a quality gaming community in spite of themselves. One never knows.

Read [8Bit Joystick]