I love my Xbox 360, but I’m also terrified of it. IT IS A FICKLE DEVICE. Sure, I’ve been lucky so far—mine hasn’t given me any trouble whatsoever. But apparently, every other 360 on the planet has either exploded, melted, or simply popped out of existence. Microsoft’s hardware is seriously flawed—or, at least, it was at the 360’s launch—meaning a ton of people have had trouble with the machine. (One guy who works here at the Mercury went through, I think, four or five 360s before getting his current one, which works fine… so far. Ah, well—at least he’s not this guy.)

Anyway: Microsoft’s finally doing something about all the complaints/repairs they’ve had to deal with, and it’s a big enough deal that even the stodgy New York Times, a publication that does not understand videogames in the slightest, is reporting on it. “The company said it would extend warranty coverage to three years to cover the problem and would reimburse customers who had previously paid for repairs…. It also said it has made improvements to the Xbox 360 console,” the Times says. And yes, this is costing Microsoft—between $1.05 billion to $1.15 billion. It must suck to know they could have saved a chunk of that cash if they’d put out a less shoddy product in the first place.

In other videogame news: Rumors of a PlayStation 3 price drop? If the Xbox’s big problem has been hardware reliability, the PS3’s has been that the damn thing costs roughly the same as a palatial Hollywood estate. Especially considering that the PS3 doesn’t even have that many great games for it—and that Nintendo’s cheap-ass Wii is making a killing—a price drop can be nothing but a good thing for Sony’s troubled console, at least as far as gamers are concerned.