As if the Red Ring of Death problems were not enough for Microsoft, the company is now blamed for the scratched Xbox 360 game discs all over the world. However, since the problem was not very common and no apparent reasons existed to link the consoles with disc scratches, not much noise was made on the matter. Until now, since a report changed things around.

According to a motion discovered by website Game Culture, Microsoft not only know that discs could be harmed if the console was repositioned, but also it rejected three possible solutions before releasing the Xbox 360 in 2005. And, ever since then, they did not care about addressing the issues!

Program manager Hiroo Umeno is the one who made the claims, saying: “This is … information that we as a team, optical disc drive team, knew about. When we first discovered the problem in September or October, when we got a first report of disc movement, we knew this is what’s causing the problem.”

Among the proposed solutions to fix the problems, an apparently cheap one was rejected by Microsoft since it was actually considered to costly! I’m talking about the installation of some small plastic bumpers (which are commonly used by many other optical disc drives) which would’ve increased the costs by $0.50 per console. So, to translate things, Microsoft refused to fix a problem they were aware of because they simply wanted to earn half a dollar more per console, even if that meant your $60 would be lost thanks to a scratched disc.

Also, having in mind that Microsoft has registered about 55,000 complaints regarding game discs (and probably there were much more, but not everybody complained) it means that the company’s refusal to spend the extra $0.50 per console put a hole of over $3 million in the gamers’ pockets.Very interesting, right?