According to Desctructoid, Playstation 3 demo units at stores are freezing up on purpose. Quoting one salesmen, "We do that so that people won't play it all day long." Aside from the shock that this is from Sony, the question becomes, is this really true.

Sony should be desperate to sell its Playstation 3 units. In fact, people hogging the demo units all day in the store isn't really all that bad, it shows that people want to play them. The last thing that Sony needs is to tick off people into not buying a unit for fear of it freezing up constantly on them.

Also, a big company like Sony would have thought of something better if people playing demo units in the store would have been a problem. Perhaps give retailers a timer that automatically shuts down the unit after someone has demoed it for, say, 30 minutes? Surely Sony could have thought of something better than freezing up the units.

Publicity is also another determining factor. Why would Sony do something that could potentially affect the sales of a device whose success is extremely critical to determine the future of Sony? Sony's had experience with bad publicity. When they first created their copy-protected CDs, they automatically installed spyware on a computer without the user's consent or knowledge. They then were faced with a lawsuit, forcing them to rethink their anti-piracy strategy on their CDs.

O course, the case of the original Sony copy-protected CDs were not entirely different than this case. Sony (or its retailers) want to stop something that people are doing, so they quietly try to change something, so it will effictively stop people without being honest with them and telling them what's happeing. So I'm not entirely convinced that this is a hoax.

And if this is installed in demo units, who's to say that a consumer doesn't end up with one of these "rigged" units? I'm assuming that only some units are rigged, and that Sony didn't make all PS3 units crash after a significant period of time.

Anyway, that's my rant. I partly doubt this report, but if it turns out to be true, boy have I lost my respect to Sony and its retailers.