‘PS3s are overheating after 3.61 update’

Sony’s 3.61 firmware patch for PS3 – which was released as parts of its efforts to plug the gaps caused by the PSN breach – may be bricking older machines.

That’s the claim of a customer services rep at developer Rockstar. The statement was made in reply to claims that users playing LA Noire on their consoles are suffering freezing issues.

We have received some reports of PS3s overheating while playing L.A. Noire or beeping three times before shutting down/turning themselves off, mostly on older 60GB and 80GB fat models,” a statement reads.

Primary reports seem to be that updating to firmware 3.61 will cause PlayStations to overheat. There have been various reports of this on a few different games now, all reporting their PS3s turning off or ‘Red Lighting’ after having installed 3.61.

This can range from games randomly freezing to PS3s turning off anywhere between 30 mins use to 2 hours. We have confirmed locally that multiple games (Rockstar and non-Rockstar) overheat or freeze only when 3.61 is installed.

At this time we are recommending contacting Sony directly to report the overheating issue. However, this is not the end of our support; we are continuing to test L.A. Noire on all firmware versions and hardware models to isolate the issues and see what can be done. As always, we will update this article as soon as we have updates.”

UPDATE: Rockstar has contacted MCV to stress that this is not an official statement from the company. It was posted by the customer support team with information sourced from the European PlayStation boards. The post has since been removed from the Rockstar site.