The Red Ring of Death threatened to destroy the Xbox 360 and the entire Xbox brand. Consoles were dying en masse. Microsoft didn't immediately know why, but it did know that it was a big problem. A plan was devised to fix gamers' hardware, but it wasn't going to be cheap: to provide the best possible experience for the unfortunate owners of expired hardware, units had to be overnighted to Microsoft, and then, once fixed, back to the waiting gamers.