An "employee of a major publisher" who wishes to remain anonymous wrote into Game Daily recently, saying that the failure rate for Xbox 360s is much higher than original estimates (he claims up to 40% - 50%), and we're only just now finding out. Why? He claims the recent release of Dead Rising is taxing systems in ways they haven't been used before.

"... it seems to center around the release of Dead Rising. The rumor no one can quite confirm right now, is that DR is one of the first games to use the Dual-Core [processors] and thus gets the machine hotter than any other games released so far," he explained.

For Capcom's part, the company doesn't seem to claim any responsibility for the apparent overheating issue. A spokesperson told us, "The game works under the specs of the 360 system and was approved by Microsoft. For anyone having issues with hardware, we have referred them to contact Microsoft for hardware support." (Capcom did not confirm at the time whether or not Dead Rising does indeed use the Dual-Core, or if this is the reason for the problem.)

[NOTE: Yes, we realize that the 360 is a tri-core machine, but the comments from the source talk about dual cores. Perhaps he meant tri-core or maybe he did mean just 2 of the 3; we're trying to find out.]

Now, I have no way of confirming the technical side of any of this. It seems odd that the guy mixed up the cores, and coming up with exaggerated claims blaming 360 problems on heat issues has been around since the day it launched. It did seem like some people were having red ring or freezing issues with Dead Rising (nowhere near 40 or 50%, though), but until there's some kind of official word, put this in the rumor column.

Source: Game Daily