Square-Enix Hits You Where It Hurts

Illness makes me a liar today. I’ll try to have a more substantive article for Wednesday.

I like to make fun of Ubisoft for their manifold show-stopping bugs, but I may have to retire that crown and pass it to Square-Enix. The merged developers of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy have allegedly discovered a way to kill an entire console with bad software.

According to 1up, Daniel Wolf has brought a class-action lawsuit to Square-Enix and Sony Computer Entertainment. He claims that Final Fantasy XIII can freeze your PS3 while saving your game. However, instead of merely corrupting your data and costing you 40 hours, it renders the console incapable of playing any media.

Daniel further alleges that the damage is “severe and widespread,” and that Sony and Square-Enix are “eminently aware of the damage being caused by their defective products, and have chosen to do nothing about it.” So he’s seeking $5 million in damages to be split among adherents to the suit.

Like all good corporations, Sony and Square-Enix have instantly turned on each other. The former blames the game disk and the latter blames console defects. However, much like the red ring of death, it’s difficult to actually gauge the prevalence of broken PS3s. So this suit may amount to nothing in the long run.

If it does work, maybe I can sue Ubisoft for the 10 hours of my life Warrior Within stole when it glitched my saves into eternity. Hell, maybe I can get the 10 hours back because it was a lousy sequel to a great predecessor.