I’m not a big gamer, but I’m also not a big fan of Microsoft (which I think is akin to being a Yankees fan, or rooting for the wolf in fairy tales… “Hasta la vista RED… Muah ha haa!”) However, even I was a bit surprised by this article from Macworld:
A new report from independent warranty provider SquareTrade has found that the failure rate of an Xbox 360 is not as high as critics would have you believe, but it is still much higher than the official number from Microsoft.
The number, 16.4 percent, is much higher than the one cited by former Xbox front man Peter Moore (3 percent), and is about half the number reported by many retailers (approximately 33 percent).
The article goes on to claim that the industry norm (average?) is around three percent. The article wasn’t clear on the time it took to fail, but considering the Xbox 360 hasn’t been on the market all that long, between one and two failures in ten seems like an incredibly high number.
In any case, I’m still happy with my Wii.
I was led to believe that it was 100% failure for units manufactured during a certain time frame. We had one of those units. It seems that a solder joint was bad and that eventually it would fail. The Dark Lord of gaming was pretty good about fixing the unit though, no cost, just some time we didn’t have it here. About two weeks. I thought that was pretty good.