B learned the hard way that Xbox 360s like to eat games when you flip the machine from vertical to horizontal orientation while playing. He sought out the publisher for a replacement and has been stuck without the game for several weeks while the company spins its wheels. Note: the disc pictured is not B’s.
He writes:
I purchased Fallout New Vegas within days of it being released in early November.During a play session my Xbox was changed from vertical to horizontal orientation. This resulted in the disc in the drive (Fallout New Vegas) being damaged and rendered unreadable.
On November 8 I called Bethsoft to ask how to pay for a replacement (the retailer refused to return it even though it was well within the 30-day warranty window saying I was on my own) they responded very quickly with an email explaining that I would need to respond with my address and some other information and that they got that, that I would be able to return the disc to be replaced. I had to call back on November 15 to ask about my RMA number, which took 24 hours to receive. I sent back the disc on November 19th and they got it the following week.
After waiting a good 10 days or so I called again the week ending December 3rd only to be told that there were no discs available. So I waited another week and called again to be told “no discs available”. At this point it is becoming a farce as they tell me things like “we have to order them from the distributor” and other plausible yet totally weak excuses.
At this point it has been 7 weeks since I first started on this odyssey and I am perturbed that I have yet to be able to actually play this game, even given the glitches that I have heard of.
I would just like them to send me a replacement disk so I can get to playing.
It’s tough to find an example of anyone talking to a game manufacturer and getting a replacement disc in a timely manner, but seven weeks seems ridiculous. On the other hand, B is sort of lucky that Bethesda is processing his warranty request because the disc was mangled as the result of his own actions.
If you’ve ever accidentally ruined a new game disc, what did you do to replace it?
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Here is what I did when my Icky teen pulled a similar move with the brand new halo reach. We borrowed his friends copy and saved it to the hard drive. When he plays halo he just puts in the unreadable disc and it works beautifully. Forget buying another disc
My car has a cd drive. Well it has a 6 CD Changer. However I driven miles over potholes, bad roads and god knows what, still the cd continues to play fine.
An expensive piece of toy like an xbox should do better.
false equivalency is false. More specifically, remove the shocks from your car and then drive over a pothole 8 to 10 feet deep with then CD playing.
The movement of your car as you drive isn’t trying to change the axis of the rotating CD. If you flipped your car while you were listening to a CD chances are the playing CD would be trashed.
This actually happened to me on a Playstation 2. I was playing Star Ocean: Till the end of time and was like 200 hours in when I kicked the controller cord and the disk took massive damage.
The guys at GameStop helped me out (thank god) but truth be told the onus was on me since I did it. This is really one of those lessons learned kinda deals….some good advice with borrowing a copy, installing to HD and then seeing if your disk can still be used.
No sheit sherlock
It only takes 2 months to get a disk replaced when the manufacturer didn’t have to replace the disk anyway?
Oh, I didn’t know I shouldn’t oh, turn my dvd player sideways while it was running and now I want a replacement disk? What the crap!
I used to work at a video rental chain (not Blockbuster) and we’d see this problem ALL the time with XBox 360 games.
If memory serves, the laser-head just rams against the disc as it wobbles. I could be wrong (it’s been about 4-5 years now) but I seem to remember there being a way to prevent this, which involves opening the XBox and putting rubber pads on the inside of the case, so in the worst case the disc would rub against that and not the laser head. Obviously even if this works though you void your warranty.
That’s epic clownery. I just bought an Xbox and it states no less than five times in the manual, on the box, on the splash screen and on the game sleeve “WARNING: DO NOT MOVE CONSOLE WHILE GAME IS IN USE. THIS WILL CAUSE DAMAGE TO YOUR GAME DISCS.”
Your fault, this is clearly stated in every xbox manual. Microsoft will replace (for a small fee) any game discs they published because of this issue, or at least they used to. And honestly, did u expect it to just be ok?
To bad you cant rent one from blockbuster and keep theirs and give them ur destroyed disc anymore as they are all closed…
1) I have to echo the sentiment… “changed from a vertical to a horizontal orientation) means it fell over which means the disc inside would not be covered by any kind of warranty.
2) If he did move it intentionally then the disc, IMHO, would still not be covered by warranty. A spinning disc is a like a gyroscope and if you move the XBox while it’s spinning the disc is going to try to maintain its orientation and probably get trashed in the process.
Sorry, but the poster is out of luck here… either scenario isn’t the fault of the store where he purchased the game, nor is it the fault of the manufacturer. This is no more a warranty-worthy situation than it would be if he broke it in half by stepping on it.
It is the owner’s fault that the disc was damaged. But Besthesda did agree to replace it. Seven weeks seems to be a pretty unreasonable length of time to wait. Which seems to be the point people are missing.
This is a flaw in the XBox 360′s design (one of many I might add; either the XBox 360 was designed by the most incompetent engineers ever or Microsoft is going a bit too far in the cost-cutting. Or more likely, both.).
I’m sorry but even with the disk spinning, a single fall shouldn’t cause the entire disk to be damaged. I tested this theory with my laptop CD/DVD drive, moving the position from horizontal to vertical and back to horizontal, multiple times and the test discs never got damaged. The easy solution to this problem is to use a drive with a tray rather than a slot load drive.
My wife did it to a rental while she was cleaning and I was playing games. She was going to pay for it when we took it back but the cashier told us not to worry about it.
I’d just eat the cost of the game and be lucky that they are replacing it at all.
You’re lucky you didn’t damage the 360 too. Retailer should have exchanged it.
I am stunned that Bethesda is even entertaining his request. He screwed up his own game disc….
I thought it was common knowledge not to move your 360 while it is on.
I had a physics experiment that explains this in highschool. If you hold a bicycle wheel in your hands by the skewer (so the wheel can spin freely in front of you), and then have someone else spin the wheel, you will notice that it is very difficult to tilt the wheel from the vertical orientation where you start to a horizontal orientation (like the xbox disc). That is because the centripetal force is pulling the wheel out and away from itself in the direction it’s spinning, and you have to fight that force when you try to tilt it. So basically, in the xbox the spinning makes the disc want to stay vertical, and by turning it on its side, it’ll likely bump up (or crash) against the top and bottom of the disc compartment. This happened to me when using an external CD drive that uses the same tray system (not the kind that grips the disc, but the kind that is in a desktop PC or the xbox). I tilted the drive while it was reading and the disc started grinding inside the drive. It scuffed up the edges of the disc, but it was still readable.
Well once the company sent him instructions on how to return the disc for replacement, 90% of the comments about it being his fault are absolutely MOOT!
As it says, they gave him instructions to return the disc for replacement. He did, he held up his side of the bargain. I don’t care if he put it in the microwave. They agreed to replace it so they should.
Then we should be reading about how this company went “Above and Beyond” due to the OP’s own fault.
My son did that to mine that was a b-day present that i did not even get to play yet. He bumped the desk that it was resting on good enough to cause the spinning disc to scratch. Fortunately I did receive the new S with the 250 Gb hard drive. We rented the game and installed it from the rented disc. The scratched disc is scratched in the middle so the game will still read the necessary disc info to allow me to play from the hard drive installation. Its a decent work around as I have been installing all the games I currently play (keeps the helicopter noise down while my wife sleeps). I did not bother trying to get a new disc however. Just a suggestion on a quick workaround. Costs you the price of a rental but no waiting.
I had the same problem and fixed the Disc myself. I simply took it to the Garage, and polished it with Scratch-X Car Wax Scratch Remover. Works like a charm, and really what’s the risk? The disc doesn’t play to begin with. Every Disc I’ve done this to, went from unplayable to perfect… Just make sure to wipe off all the wax and residue when complete.
I ruined a CD-ROM drive years ago by moving a PC that had a disc in the drive.
I had an Xbox game that started skipping at one point. The early Xboxes could scratch discs, but this problem was overshadowed by the Red Ring of Death issue. I just ran it through a CD repair device made for music CDs and it played fine after that.
I’ve done the same thing. I took the disc to GameStop and explained what happened, and they still bought it from me for the same price they’d buy that game (Oblivion for $6) in a good condition. I guess they could repair it?
Personally, I didn’t think it was Bethesda’s responcibility to replace a disc that a newbie destroyed when I was showing them how an xbox worked (I was explaining that they could put it on its side or set it up right when my friend promptly changed how it was sitting while it was loading Oblivion).
However, I think it was wrong for Bethesda to take the disc back and not send another.
Ideal resolution when it’s not distributor’s/developer’s fault: Bethesda sends a copy of the disc and makes the consumer pay for shipping and the basic cost of the disc, after receiving the damaged disc as verification that the person receiving the new one did buy it. However, if this solution did work, people would use it to replace their scratched to hell discs as well, which would be plenty of work for Bethesda’s distibutor. Add a reasonable fee, good to go. After paying the shipping, cost of disc, and potential reasonable fee, this would only be beneficial when total cost of replacing the disc is less than the cost of purchasing a used copy.