As reported yesterday, Belgian games retail chain Games Mania told Dutch site Gamed.nl that although the 40GB PS3 had been selling well, around four-in-ten machines were being returned after they stopped reading discs.

However, in a statement issued today, SCEE “categorically denies that there is a 40 per cent failure rate on the newly released 40GB PlayStation 3 ... the 40GB PS3 has encountered the same very low failure rates of the 60GB PS3.”

David Reeves, president of SCEE, certainly wasn’t pulling his punches, dismissing the story as “sloppy journalism” on the part of the Duch site before going on to applaud the PS3: “Since launching the 40GB PS3, we have experienced a fantastic jump in sales and the failure rates have remained at the very low level that we not only strive for, but have been achieving since the launch of PS3.”

As we pointed out yesterday, the lack of hard figures in the Dutch site’s story and the scarcity of similar accounts from other countries did seem a tad strange for such a high number of failures – certainly, if the comments section from our story yesterday are anything to go by, most seem to be experiencing no problems with their PS3s.

Gamed.nl has subsequently withdrawn the original story, and issued the following statement:

(translated)

“Yesterday we published a report that the Belgian chain Game Mania has been receiving a large number of defective PS3 40GB consoles back from customers. Today, we received clarification of this information.

“The statistics that were published on Gamed.nl (namely that 40 per cent of the 40GB machines were defective) appears to be an isolated case. According to Sony and Game Mania, these figures are not representative of the whole region and both parties have requested that the article be amended."

So there you go – all’s fine and good in the world of PlayStation 3. All you rabid PlayStaion fans can wipe your mouths and settle down now.