August 17 5:47 P.M.
The legendary Red Ring of Death
If you own an Xbox 360 and have never had a hardware failure, you're a very fortunate individual, according to new figures from top print magazine Game Informer. Their latest issue polled over 5,000 console owners, and determined that the Xbox 360 boasts a failure rate of over 54%, compared with about 10% for the PS3 and 6.8% for the Wii.
The Xbox's hardware issues are well documented, and Microsoft announced in 2007 that it would extend the console's warranty from one to three years for machines suffering several common faults. The cause of the machine's woes isn't clear, but an investigative Venturebeat article from last year pointed its fingers at factors including a rushed design process, the machine's groundbreaking complexity, and cost-cutting initiatives that hamstrung quality assurance tests.
Estimates of the 360's actual error rate are hard to verify -- after all, owners who haven't suffered problems are less likely to respond to surveys, and Microsoft isn't coughing up any numbers. But every time we've run a story about Xbox 360 hardware failures we've been inundated with "me too!" emails and comments. Ask enough owners and you'll turn up horror stories of gamers being on their fifth or sixth Xbox. If anything, 54% seems a trifle low.
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Posted: 17 Aug 2009
