A Dutch website had been reporting that Belgian gaming retailer Games Mania was experiencing a failure rate of about 40% on the 40GB PS3s. Customers were bringing them back due to constant disc read errors. Sony has responded to this story by denying it outright. If this seems like a familiar scenario, you’re right. This sounds suspiciously like the same thing that happened with Xbox 360s and the notorious overheating errors. An attentive consumer would think that maybe Sony would have learned from the experience and dispatched some people to check into the rumors. Instead of insisting that there’s nothing wrong with their product and blaming this talk on ‘sloppy journalism’ it might have been a better move to send someone out to check out the validity of the complaint. It’d certainly be a good public relations move. If this turns out to be another big problem they’ll look just as silly as Microsoft.