First, I must say that I LOVE this game and since it's out, I play in average at leat 15h /week, have done maybe 80-90% of all the quest and I never had any major problem as other may have. In 10 months I had 3 freeze and hit some of the quest bugs report by other but nothing too annoying.
I play with all autosave on since the beginning and don't spend specific attention to the way I play
Also after spending hundred of hours in this game, it still happen that I enter a place and just WOW! This world is amazing and I spend a few minutes just watching around in admiration.. and frankly, for the price of one game, having so much fun with it for this long, I just thank bethesda for giving us such wonderful games and it's a pity that people have problem with it.

My system: PS3 bought the first week it was out (a 20GB system with PS2 compatibility and 4 usb ports) upgraded with a 500GB 7200 tr/m

Now to the point: It seems that FIFA 13 has the same kind of problems as skyrim: lags, [censored]tering, crash when playing, freezewhen loading/saving etc. so maybe the problem is not the programming but the hardware.. search in youtube and you'll find many videos showing it.

In the fifa forum, someone report that disabling network/media player in the console solve his problems

I just wanted to share this for those of you that can not enjoy skyrim and maybe it may be something to try..

Welcome to the forums.

The symptoms may sound similar but the causes are completely different, we have disproved the hardware being a factor in Skyrim's issues beyond the lack of code optimisation for the platform many, many times.

FIFA 13 is suffering from similar problems that caused problems with FIFA 12 (This being another game that is more an update than new game, they should just add DLC each year with team and player updates and be honest about it imo) Oh yeah the problem with FIFA is that it is heavily reliant on background communication over the PSN pushing all the players stats around and for the league stuff they do etc. The EA servers are notorious for glitching out and the poor networking causes issues within the game, even the EA forum servers have been getting closed over the last few months as the infrastructure needs updating.

So nice thinking but the PS3 is fine, beyond yours being a bit more fragile compared to the slim but it's doing well lasting this long, congrats.

Now I'm off for another 6 hour Borderlands 2 session, not a single problem in over 2 weeks, very refreshing.

Fair enough.
But why does skyrim and fifa 13 works very very well on *my* PS3 (and also on many other PS3 systems) and does not on other?
In both cases the code is the same..So even if the code may be better optimized (for both games) it still runs well on *my* system at least..
Maybe this is caused because some components in *my* kind of PS3 are different from other system?

I think it's more to do with a lot of these bugs/glitches being really random. I haven't had the game freeze while going underwater yet others have. The conditions for these bugs/glitches need to be just right for them to happen. It's the same when you talk about the YLOD that the older fat PS3's suffered from. My 40GB model got it after 2 - 3 years yet your older 20GB model hasn't. Theres so many variables for these things to happen that it doesn't happen with everyone.

Thats my theory anyway.