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After four years of issues, Microsoft seemingly eradicated the last of the red ring of death issues that plagued the Xbox 360 with the launch of the Xbox 360 Slim last year… but now reports seem to indicate that the Red Ring of Death might be back with a vengeance thanks to the launch of the Kinect.
A number of complaints have been lodged by gamers suddenly facing the dreaded red ring after plugging in their Kinect. The story was broken on BBC Radio 4, where many listeners claimed that the Kinect was causing their Xbox 360 hardware to fail.
“We plugged [Kinect] in the day we got it but only played it a few times before we got the red lights,” said one customer. “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.”
Microsoft, on their part, denies there’s any link. “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.”
So who should we believe here? My guess is that the issue here is more people spending a lot of time on their Xbox 360s after buying a Kinect. Since the RROD error s mostly caused by Xbox 360s that have melted from the heat, there’s some sense in the supposition that the Kinect isn’t so much breaking Xbox 360s as prompting people to play older 360s until they die. That’s not quite the same thing.
Time will tell. It’ll be interesting to see where this story goes from here: either it’ll prove to be a legitimate hardware issue, or an issue of correlation being mistaken for causation. My money would be on the latter.
