Report: Xbox 360 Console Most Likely to Fail; Wii is Most Reliable

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on September 2, 2009 - 10:33am.

San Francisco - Microsoft's (NASD: MSFT) Xbox 360 consoles fail at a rate of 23.7% during their first two years of use, compared with a failure rate of 10% for Sony's (NYSE: SNE) PlayStation 3 and just 2.7% for Nintendo's Wii, according to a survey of 16,000 failed consoles conducted by warranty provider Square Trade.

The report did note that, after Microsoft redesigned the Xbox 360 with its "Jasper" chipset in late 2008, reports of the "Red Ring of Death" signaling a console failure have begun to abate.

The company ponied up $1.5 billion to address warranties for failed Xbox 360 consoles.

Square Trade noted that the most common types of problems seen with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 were disc read errors and output issues.

VentureBeat cited another survey of 5,000 consoles, conducted by Game Informer magazine, which found the Xbox 360 failure rate was 54.2%, compared to 10.6% for the PlayStation 3 and 6.8% for the Wii.

That survey also found that 41.2% of Xbox 360 owners would go on to experience a second failure of their repaired consoles.

Related Links:
http://snipurl.com/rjxb5 (Square Trade)

http://snipurl.com/rjxbg (VentureBeat)

http://snipurl.com/rjxbb (WSJ)