20th May 2011

Post with 1 note

How the L.A. Noire overheating issue might not be an issue at all

I’ve been looking over the stories about L.A. Noire overheating PS3s and 360s and the response from Rockstar and Sony and it occurs to me that there is a perfectly plausible explanation for this which puts it all down to chance factors rather than any actual fault. I don’t have any data to support this, I’m merely suggesting that this is plausible and consistent with what we’ve heard so far.

1. PSN lurches slowly back to life and L.A. Noire comes out in the same week.
2. This means a lot of people are turning their PS3s back on.
3. From that fact alone, you’d expect to see a minor spike in PS3 hardware issues around this time, because some systems are just going to have problems, randomly.
4. L.A. Noire and the PSN update are probably the two most popular PS3 activities right now.
5. Whenever anything goes wrong, humans have a tendency to find a pattern rather than attribute it to random chance.
6. Under the circumstances, either L.A. Noire or the update make perfect targets for blame.

Meanwhile…

7. The story emerges that the problem is happening on the 360, too, but only a little while after the PS3 story.
8. This can be explained by the fact that a certain number of 360s have overheating or failure issues anyway, with hardware issues being kind of common for the system.
9. If they’re looking for something to blame, they need look no further than what’s being reported about the PS3.

In conclusion, it’s entirely possible that this whole story is a red herring.

  1. surplusgamer posted this