RRoD Issue Forced Xbox Team To Effectively Run Two Businesses

Former Chief Xbox Officer Robbie Bach has been talking to Gameplay.co as part of a new podcast about the infamous Red Ring of Death issue on the Xbox 360, revealing more insight into the costly technical fault.

The error, which would see the Xbox 360 flashing three red lights when the console had developed a catastrophic error, was referred to as a "billion dollar problem" by former Xbox executive Peter Moore, and Microsoft ended up extending the standard warranty on the Xbox 360 to three years following increasing reports of the issue.

Here's what Robbie Bach had to say about the RRoD in the Gameplay podcast:

"Effectively what it meant is we were running two businesses. So we had the business of selling Xbox’s and selling games - the regular business, I'll call it. And then we had a second business, which was the business of repairing and replacing consoles when people had a problem. And we literally had separate facilities. Pretty much the same team, I don't think we added a lot of headcount to deal with this problem. But separate facility, separate vendors, a separate logistics process..."

Bach went on to point out that despite the issue, which lost the company a lot of money over a fairly short period of time, the Xbox 360 remained the highest customer satisfaction product he ever worked on.

"It's actually kind of crazy. But what it tells you is the following; people love the product. And because Microsoft was willing and able to fix this thing for as long as it took to fix it, people were pretty patient with us. They said, “hey, you're doing me right, I get it, you have a problem, you're doing me right, you're fixing it, I get a new console, and away I go. And it just reinforces the fact that, you know, taking care of your customers and doing the right thing for customers will always benefit you."

There's a lot more insight into the Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death issue in the full podcast, so we highly recommend checking it out over at Gameplay.co (there's also a transcript if you fancy reading it instead!).

Did your Xbox 360 suffer from the RRoD issue? Let us know in the comments section below.

[source gameplay.co]