Watchdog accused of exaggeration

Following BBC show Watchdog’s somewhat farcical attack on PS3 last week, one of the consumers that starred in the segment has come out and claimed that he was encouraged to exaggerate the problems his console had suffered.

When asked by TheSixthAxis whether the BBC had told him to embellish the story of how his PS3 malfunctioned, the anonymous respondent claimed: Categorically, yes.”

The source was also critical of the BBC’s reporting of the matter. The show lacked vital info on things like models that were affected, any decent explanation as to what had happened to the console, and they only aired the brief story of what had happened to one of the people on the show, when the three of us had different circumstances as to what happened in each instance.

They also only concentrated on the YLOD problem, when they could have also brought up the issue where the Blu-ray drive fails, although Sony honour those fixes as they recognise it as a problem.”

Hours before last week’s Watchdog was aired Sony went public with a strongly-worded criticism of the programme, which the platform holder labelled as factually incorrect.

The BBC responded to some of the criticism, though its actions were not enough to fight off widespread ridicule from the UK games industry.

This latest scuffle with Sony is just the latest in a long line of video game related scraps for the BBC show. As well as pointing the finger at Nintendo’s Brain Training, Watchdog has also previously highlighted both Xbox 360’s reliability problems and alleged issues with disc scratching.