Plaintiffs in the US District Court case are seeking class-action status on behalf of all those who bought Xbox 360s. They allege that, when the 360 is spinning a game disc, even the slightest nudge of the console can lead to irreparable damage to the media.
Information from motion, which hopes to take Microsoft to a Civil Court over the allegations, is unsealed and publicly available in one document. It is this document which quotes internal Microsoft staff admitting that the 360’s tendency to scratch discs in certain situations was known months before the console’s worldwide launch.
The document quotes Hiroo Umeno, a Microsoft program manager, who says that “this is ... information that we as a team, optical disc drive team, knew about. When we first discovered the problem in September or October [2005], when we got a first report of disc movement, we knew this is what's causing the problem."
As the motion states, Microsoft then took a team of engineers to sample the console in stores across the US as it was being released to “investigate complaints that the Xbox 360 was routinely scratching discs during demonstrations.” The team confirmed that a nudge or tilt to the console would collide the disc with the console’s optical pick-up, thus leaving damaging scars on the media.
The motion then alleges that Microsoft then considered three options to fix the problem to the console. One was to increase the magnetic field of the disc holder, another was to slow the disc drive’s 7,500 RPM speed, another was to install small bumpers.
Microsoft eventually rejected all these ideas, the motion states. The magnetic field would have interfered with the disc tray open/close switch, whereas slowing the disc’s drive speed would have slowed loading times, and bumpers would have cost the company up to $75m.
Instead, Microsoft operated a disc replacement scheme for its own published software (costing consumers $20 each), and included a warning message on the game manual and to the disc drive: “Remove discs before moving the console or tilting it between the horizontal and vertical positions.” The motion states that Microsoft employees suggested in an internal e-mail that the warning was insufficient.
Microsoft has received more than 55,000 complaints about scratched discs as of April this year.
The documentation can be read in full (via a large pdf) here.