On Thursday, an employee at a major publisher who wished to remain anonymous wrote in to Game Daily, claiming that 360 failure rates were more like 45 or 50%, and that the recently released Dead Rising was stressing machines by using more cores and thus generating more heat, causing more systems to fail. Microsoft has now responded, first by sussing out that the employee works for EA. I don't know how they did that, but usually when someone finds out where an anonymous source works, that person ends up in a ditch. At least, that's what TV tells me.

Responding to this employee's letter, a Microsoft representative told GameDaily BIZ, "We can confirm that the letter was neither endorsed nor approved by Electronic Arts. At this point we have no reason to believe that the claims made in the letter are based on factual data as opposed to being just an individual opinion."

The rep continued, addressing the 30-50% claim, "We can't speak directly to the situation at EA and the conditions of use of each one of our consoles and would encourage you to contact them directly. What we can tell you is that the vast majority of Xbox 360 owners are having an outstanding experience with their new systems. Each incident is unique and these customer inquires are being handled on a case-by-case basis. We have not seen anything out of the ordinary in the current return situation that we experience."

MS doesn't seem to have said anything specifically about Dead Rising, but the Game Daily article does point to other people having problems, such as one of the writers at Ars Technica's Opposable Thumbs blog, who had to get his system replaced. It seems like Dead Rising does indeed tax the 360 more than other games, and it may be exposing pre-existing flaws in systems that hadn't yet run hot enough to fail. You might even want to rent the game or at least play the demo as a kind of test for your system, especially if you got your console at launch. Of course, you should have the game anyway, because it's awesome.