His courage is admirable, but unfortunately misplaced. His job was to test next-gen consoles. It shouldn't have been surprising that he'd find bugs. And since he was a tester, he likely saw far more bugs than most end-users, simply because he was looking for them.

I empathize with his frustration with Microsoft. He probably felt like they were not listening to his reports, or if they were, that they were focusing on problems that he believed to be less important. However, as a game developer, I understand why it can take a very long time to respond to a playtester's bug report. In the game industry, you're constantly working on improvements. There really is no downtime. So, tester identifies bug; tester reports bug; manager schedules bugfix; developer finishes what he's doing; developer reproduces the bug; developer fixes the bug; developer does a "programmer test" to verify that the bug is actually fixed; code is checked in, which is queued to be deployed; and finally, the bugfix is deployed back to the original tester. It can take anywhere from two days to two months for certain bugfixes, through no fault of the process. (A process like that is inevitable for codebases that are millions of lines of code.) And once you throw in the fact it is probably difficult to deploy new code to consoles, and also that the testers aren't in the same building as the developers, that process can probably take quite a long time from the point of view of the tester.

So that said, I don't understand why he felt it was a good idea to be a whistleblower in this case. There really is no big scandal. If a console fails, Microsoft will replace it.

Also, I assume he signed a non-disclosure agreement, which he brazenly violated.