It has been quite a long time since we’ve heard any news regarding the dreaded “Red Ring of Death” that seemed to be an Xbox 360 epidemic the first few years the console was sold. Now, however, since the launch of Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing add-on for the console, there seems to be a new wave of the telltale system failures.
Xbox 360 owners, who haven’t had any issues with their consoles until they hooked up their new Kinect, are understandably blaming the new device for their system failures.
"We plugged it in the day we got it but only played it a few times before we got the red lights. The next day when we tried it again we still had the red rings of death and haven't been able to use it since." Ten-year old Adam Winnifrith told BBC reporters. “It is quite a shame as we got loads of new games for the Xbox too and I never had a chance to play them."
Winnifrith’s father, James, explained that the console’s failure was even more disappointing since the warranty had just expired on December 16th.
"It's very disappointing. We were planning to have a big New Year's Day party with karaoke microphones and a Take That competition. But now the Xbox is just sitting idle," James said.
And the Winnifrith family isn’t the only case. Several more instances of Xbox 360 failures immediately following the connection of a Kinect are starting to show up on online gaming forums. Despite this, Microsoft is claiming that there is no connection between the Kinect and the sudden console failures.
"There is no correlation between the three flashing red lights error and Kinect. Any new instances of the three flashing red lights error are merely coincidental," A Microsoft representative told the BBC.
Considering that over 2.5 million Kinects were sold during their first month on the market, I’m apt to believe that a handful of “Red Ring of Death” occurrences may not be related to the device itself. And, since the Kinect has been on sale for barely two months, it’s definitely too early to make any kind of determination.
Situations like this put manufacturers like Microsoft in a tough spot. When a new product is released, it’s nearly impossible to test every type of scenario consumers will encounter once they have the product at home. When you have millions of happy customers, twenty or thirty with the same issue don’t even register on the company’s radar. Of course, I do hope that those with system failures get good customer service from Microsoft, but there is simply not enough evidence at this point to blame the Kinect for the issues.
