Report claims Xbox 360 failure rates at 16%, Wii and PS3 at 3%

Nothing is infallible, but it definitely makes good business to make your product’s failure rate to be as low as possible. Now check out what a warranty-providing company has found out about the failure rates of today’s three next-gen consoles (them being the Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii) and how the company came up with it. The info at the full article.

For those of us on a limited budget, buying a console involves careful consideration of the pros, cons, upcoming/released titles, and failure rates, or the chances of a console bricking itself during usage. On this matter, we receive a report from SquareTrade, an online independent warranty provider, and the numbers (that is, the failure rates for all three consoles) is a bit surprising.

So, what ARE the numbers? As we all know, Microsoft‘s green machine, the Xbox 360, has a particularly-annoying (and prevalent) gremlin known as the Red Ring of Death – and predictably, it has the highest failure rate of all three consoles, weighing in at around 16%. The Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii slipped by with only 3%. Do note that the sample size for all three consoles number in the high hundreds, with SquareTrade using its numerous warranty claims as the basis.

While the figures are certainly high for the Xbox 360, it’s definitely a sight better than the 33% failure rate that it had been branded with. But that’s not where the good news begins, as SquareTrade CEO Steve Abernethy predicts that this percentage will slowly rise over time as currently-working consoles keep getting used. His statement, verbatim:

It is reasonable to believe these failure rates will increase over time, since the Xbox 360 failure issues tend to increase with prolonged use where overheating appears the main culprit.

Of course, this prediction may or may not ring true, as Steve himself admitted that the company didn’t keep track of motherboard variations while they were compiling the numbers for the Xbox 360, estimating that a fair number of the claims received came from owners of the first iteration. So if Microsoft keeps pushing better, faster, and cooler units, that failure rate may soon dwindle into nothing. Here’s hoping so, in any case, and you can read more about this by clicking on the via link below.