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Report: Xbox 360 has worst failure rate, Wii has best
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RROD issues have abated with the latest 360 chipset
A new report by SquareTrade, which looked at 16,000 randomly selected US consoles covered by the company’s warranty plan, says the Wii is the most reliable console while Xbox 360 has the highest failure rate. The PlayStation 3 fell between the other two consoles.
In the first two years of ownership, only 2.7% person of Wii owners reported problems, compared to 10% of PS3 owners and 27.3% of Xbox 360 owners. The Wii is thus nine times more reliable than the 360 and four times more reliable than the PS3.
Xbox 360 problems went beyond the infamous ‘red ring of death’ (RROD) symptom; 11.7% of 360 owners experienced other failures. SquareTrade found that RROD was a major factor for consoles purchased through 2008, but the problem abated for consoles purchased in 2009 (likely manufactured after the introduction of the Jasper chipset in late 2008). Looking ahead, the report notes that if the RROD is indeed solved, the failure rate for Xbox 360s may be only slightly higher than for PS3s going forward.
SquareTrade admits that its Xbox 360 failure numbers could be skewed low because owners could have bypassed the company’s warranty plan to report failures directly to Microsoft. They estimate the RROD failure rate could be as high as 35%. That would square (no pun intended) more closely with GameInformer’s survey of 5,000 console owners that found a whopping 54.2% failure rate among 360s.
The report also looked at console usage to estimate reliability not only by unit but by time of usage according to Nielsen’s April 2009 gamer study. The PS3 was the most-used console at 1191 minutes (19.85 hours) per month compared to 1051 minutes (17.5 hours) for 360 and 516 minutes (8.6 hours) for Wii. Applying these figures over the two-year span of the study, the Xbox 360 still had the highest failure rate per 24 hours of use at 1.35% compared to 0.50% for PS3 and 0.31% for Wii.
Overall, one has to hand it to Nintendo’s engineering team for creating the most reliable console—at the same time, they had the easiest challenge with the least amount of processing power to deal with. Making the more direct comparison between 360 and PS3, it seems Sony’s engineers did the better job although in its third generation of chipset the 360 appears to have narrowed the gap when it comes to reliability.
For more info: Read the full report.
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