Aaron_Fancher August 17, 2009 PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360 95 views Comments Print This Post  Email This Post

“The red ring of death” is a phrase that strikes fear into the very hearts of Xbox 360 owners everywhere. Sony and Nintendo fanboys often point to this as the biggest drawback to the xbox 360 system. I guess Microsoft has their 54.2 percent failure rate to thank for that. This does not look good for Microsoft especially when you compare the failure rate to Sony’s 10.6 percent for the PS3 and the Wii’s 6.8 percent.

Game Informer surveyed nearly 5,000 readers to get the data on the console failure rates. While the 360’s rate is much higher than the others, it is still pretty low considering that 45.8 percent of the consoles have not broken. Microsoft’s numbers are also inflated because the 360 is used the most out of the three consoles. 40.3 percent of 360 owners use the console three to five hours a day, as apposed to the 37 percent of PS3 owners. Meanwhile, 41.1 percent of Wii owners play their consoles less than an hour a day.

To make matters worse for Microsoft, they also won the gold medal for unhelpful customer service, taking almost a month to repair consoles, while Nintendo and Sony are closer to a week. Still, 37.7 percent of customers found the company’s customer service was “very helpful”.

Apparently people aren’t that mad considering that only 3.8 percent of Xbox 360 owners said they would never buy another Xbox because of hardware failure.