Seeing as most people here are starting crazy, angry rants about this that inevitably get closed, I thought I'd try to have a healthy conversation about the possibility of this problem. I've seen mods close threads on this topic (due to their rant-like nature, not content) saying point blank, "the game can't damage the system". I feel this is false or at least not necessarily true.

Let me paint a scenario. Imagine that you have an old pentium 4 and managed to play a pc game that is just above your pc's abilities. You may be able to play it for awhile, but your machine will overheat and the stress will eventually cause the components to break.

Likewise, the bug in Skyrim overtaxes the ps3 system. Pete Hines admitted this in the holiday announcement, go look. Taxing the system is a very specific word in the technology industry. It means you're working something harder than it should be. People have been playing for one hour until the game slowed down to a crawl and took this as just a time to restart the console and not let it have time to cool down. The fact is, them starting the system over and over again may have just been wearing the ps3 down to the breaking point.

This is a viable problem and we should all be aware of it. It would take actually testing and studies to rule out this possibility. Once that has been done, we can say the game can't damage or is damaging systems. I seriously doubt that this is a common problem if it does exist. Some ps3's are simply at the end of their life and this is their natural end (consoles are likely to break down on a game you play a lot, regardless). It'll be difficult to prove that anyones' system was damaged. I fear that something like this could seriously open the flood gates for people to take unfair advantage of the situation and make false claims just to get something they want for free. But there may be those few people who actually deserve compensation.

Additionally, it technically wouldn't be the game itself damaging the system, it would be the save file. The game with a smaller save file functions normally without any need to restart the system.

While that is all fine, this is not general discussion. This board is not to discuss potential problems, it is to discuss actual problems. These boards are not here for us to speculate on what causes the problems.

I'm sorry but thats simply not true, first your anology of putting a new game on an old pc, it would not damage it, it would just run incredibly slow, like 2-3 fps if that, no damage would be done.

Sure you can overclock a cpu and fry it, same for a gpu but not the PS3, games cannot change the cpu frequency, if, IF the PS3 is broken due to high temperatures ie gpu then that is not a game issue, its a basic Sony design issue.

in short, a PS3 game cannot damage a PS3, PS3's die all the time but its either via 'end of life' or a component failure. and it could just as easily die just be being turned on.

Overheating a CPU is a hardware issue and not a software issue. You can't overheat a cpu with software alone unless there is some hardware problem like insufficient cooling, which would be an error in design, and then the system will shut down. If Folding@home doesn't overtax your PS3 then Skyrim won't either.
Much less an multicore CPU, because the main CPU itself distributes the work to specific cores and hardly any software make use of all cores. Free cores are in queue to wait for work. The main CPU rotates trough cores and picks the ones that were idle the longest to assign new work to them.

Overtaxing the system doesn't only apply to the CPU. You can overtax the memory, the bus, the hard disk or any component in the system, depending where the bottleneck is.

I doubt restarting the system at that frequency would hurt it.

Say you have a system in danger of overheating, due to how it is placed. If you only play Solitaire, you are not in as much danger of getting to the danger level as if you play Crysis. However, you can't get a piece of software that will "run too many operations through the chips" and somehow bust them like you tried to stuff a 30lb turkey into your sink garbage disposal.

I suffered the dreaded YLOD on my old 60GB fat PS3 last Sunday.

It happened during Skyrim but other than that my experience on the PS3 was near flawless. Level 30, 70+ hours and just one freeze. Just one. Amazing. I never once got stuck in a rock, no framerate drops, no corrupt saves, and other than a couple of physics glitches (a horse stuck in the ground), it was near perfection. Save game file exactly 10MB.

I never once thought that it was being overtaxed, and I certainly don't link Skyrim to my PS3 blowout. Its just bad luck on an ageing console. But I do find it amazing that some PS3s can barely run the game, whereas mine was near perfect. I never understood that at all.

In summary, no. I don't think that a single game can damage a system by overtaxing. Constant freezes + hard resets, possibly. Though either case would be impossible to prove.

That first part, overheating of a component does happen but that would be more of a design flaw on Sony than the games problem. Plus look at some people (myself) who can play any other game, except the ones using this engine, for days at a time and it never crashes. That's one game being on for 72+ hours. I've even "folded" for a week straight before. What happens with this game, or any other one with this engine? It crashes at various points, seemingly random, sometimes within minutes of a cold start where it's almost impossible that a component would have overheated.

Second part, I can stress test my CPU with Prime 95 to where temps are at max level. Within a few seconds of stopping it the temp levels of every core (quad) are back down to what they'd be if I just turned on the computer. It's not that they needed to keep the PS3 turned off because overheating isn't the issue. What's more likely is there is a memory leak with the game, or something similar, so of course resetting (essentially) the console is going to fix the issue when it restarts.

You guys need some avatars; my brain is registering you all as the same person.

If you're being forced into constant hard resets, then yes, this could damage the HDD.

As others have said, software can't push a processor past 100% usage so overheating wouldn't be an issue unless the machine was already faulty.

There was something about Bayonetta that was really bad for the Blu-Ray drive though, presumably the way they arranged the data on the disc. My drive would make weird noises that no other game would cause, then eventually broke down. The same noise happened on my new console too, so I played it safe and binned Bayonetta. Rubbish game anyway.

Why was this put in General? I never go here, it's difficult as heck to read anything in this forum right now, until someone fixes the font/background.

Anyways, as I said before, there is an element of user error here. The users are/were instantly restarting the machine every hour (their fault for not letting the system cool off) or the machine froze and they had to force a restart, some with great regularity (not their fault).

The problem isn't pushing the processor past 100%, it's running the ps3 at 100% constantly for many hours every day with hard resets or normal resets every hour only when things got too bad. Even a well made machine isn't meant to run like that. There's a reason why Pete Hines used the word taxing when refering to what Skyrim is doing to the ps3. He wouldn't admit that unless it were true and the/part of the problem here.

Can a moderator please move this to the ps3 skyrim tech forum? Bolded for this stupid forum background/font combination that's impossible to read.