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Xbox 360 Failure Rate Is 54.2%
Colonel Korn writes "The Seattle PI Blog is reporting that a soon to be published Game Informer survey finally shows the failure rate of XBOX 360s: 54%! The survey also shows the rates of failure for the PS3 (11%) and Wii (7%). Impressively, only 4% of respondents said they wouldn't buy a new 360 because of hardware failures."
"According to the print edition of Game Informer, 5,000 surveyed people said the XBox 360 fails over half the time. The same survey found failure rates of 10.6% for Sony's PS3 and 6.8% on Nintendo's Wii. Microsoft trounced the competition with over five times the next highest failure rate. The article also notes that the survey revealed a skew to the numbers as the Xbox's were the most used consoles: 'Results said 40.3 percent of 360 owners use the console three to five hours a day, compared to 37 percent of PS3 owners. Meanwhile, the plurality of Wii owners (41.4 percent) play their consoles less than an hour a day.' Even worse news for Microsoft is that only 3.8% said they would buy another Xbox (due to failures) and the survey found they had rather shoddy customer service."
So it should be noted that a potential skew is that from the surveyed five thousand, Xbox users play their console more than Wii or PS3 users. While this certainly wouldn't explain the skewed percentages, it indicates the consoles are in higher use causing potentially more wear and tear.
But yeah, bad indicator for Microsoft and this new information actually caused me to wait to buy an Xbox 360 at the new reduced price. I think the 3.8% figure of repeat business is a good indicator that a lot of people agree.
Off-topic musing: It's interesting this Game Informer dead tree article has such virtual world implications yet the original source chose for it to be only released in their print edition and not on their site. Has GI always done this? An indication of things to come or a death knell for its readership?
My work here is dung.
To combine the expandability of a game console with the reliability of a PC stuffed with chinese manufactured expansion cards!
Focused significantly more on quality control and then simply shipped every second 360 casing with packing peanuts and achieved the same result?
Now we just need to know how often people play their consoles. I have a Wii. I bought it because it looked fun and it wasn't overprices. Now, I'm not and avid gamer. I only play maybe 1 or 2 hours every couple of weeks. At such low usage, I would be surprised if the thing didn't last for 20 years. Many people I know with Wii's fall into this same category. Contrast that with XBox, where I think many more people are avid gamers, and would use their machines much more. A higher failure rate would be expected. Probably not this much more of a failure rate, but a higher one none the less. Also, take into account the fact that MS will replace your broken unit with a refurb, and that most people who get a replacement unit, will put the unit back in the exact same spot, with poor ventilation and cooling that the previous one was at, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
From the Article:
"Just 3.8 percent of respondents said they wouldn't buy another Xbox because of system failures, according to Game Informer. And 36.4 percent of people who had an Xbox 360 fail have purchased more than one Xbox."
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Impressively, only 4% of respondents said they wouldn't buy a new 360 because of hardware failures.
You mean "appallingly" right? Talk about low standards.
I think that's lower than some of Microsoft's other products. Redmond must be celebrating...
I don't see what's so "frustrating" about the RROD. I had one of the first batch 360s, and didn't get the ring until 2 years later. Sent the console in for repair, had it back in under a week. Didn't cost me anything to fix, and haven't had problems since.
And this is with it getting plenty of use as a DVD player and media streaming box as well. It's not like I just have it sitting around unused.
But the 54.2% failure rate is controlled by the failure rate for other consoles in the same survey. You claim that being sealed in cabinets killed a large number of Xbox360s. Presumably the same should be true of PS3s, but their failure rate is almost exactly a fifth that of the 360. This survey is just further evidence that Microsoft have extremely poor quality control WRT the Xbox.
at the boardroom is the one thing on my mind.
Engineer: very few, say less than 5% of people say they will refuse to buy an XBox due to its failure rate
Ballmer: so what is the failure rate?
Engineer: uh, more than 50%...
Ballmer: So....we're boiling a frog it seems?
Engineer: we may as well be vaporizing a frog. it neither knows, nor cares.
Good people go to bed earlier.
These are the same fanbois that bitch that a PROPERLY engineered device is too big, too ugly, etc.
Honestly, from all I have seen and read, the xbox is just in too small of a case. its all heat related issues. Trouble is as consumers, if they made it a little bigger, gave it larger fans, better cooling vents, etc.* we'd be up in arms that "its too bulky. if I wanted something this big I'd buy a computer!" but wait boys and girls, it IS a computer; its just a uni-tasker as my hero Alton Brown would say.
So the cut goes both ways. Never let Marketing have too much say in product design; Give them too much leeway and they'll F it up.
*or M$ owned up to the failed heat paste and corrected it. Trouble is thanks to lawyering, if they actually DID the right thing and admitted a design fault the'd be sued into oblivion becuase they sold a crap device. Instead they just say "nothing to see here... move along. Here's a free repair!" and appease the masses.
Actually MS has released later revisions of the 360 that fix a lot of the problems with the first gen consoles. I've had a 360 for years now and other than a PSU failure and the HD-DVD drive cutting in and out, I've had no problems. And this is a first gen.
You bought an extended warranty? Hopefully you didn't pay very much for it. The 360 has a three 3 year warranty for RRoD and E74 failures, which is what most failures are.
Last month my 2.5 year old 360 started freezing intermittently, but wouldn't red ring. I had to keep playing games and letting it die until it would finally red ring every time I started it. Its brutal that you have to do that in order to qualify for a replacement 360, but at least it only took 9 days from the day I shipped it to receive my replacement. If my 360 dies after the 3 year warranty is up I would rather spend the warranty money on a new 360 that runs cooler, draws less power, etc.
I shudder to think what the warranty process was like a few months after the 360 was released, which is why I would never buy a launch Playstation or Xbox. My 5 Nintendo based systems have never failed once (Well the NES can be a bit of pain sometimes, ha ha).
Readers of Game Informer are obviously heavier users of their XBOX360s than the average owner who is casual and does not read any gaming magazines.
When you want to use statistics you have to use a truly random sample if you want your results to be interpreted as valuable.
What we have here is known as a sample of convenience. It was easy for Game Informer to simply poll its loyal readers rather than get a truly random sample of XBOX360 owners.
Might as well ask people at the STD clinic if they have ever had an STD, then extrapolate these results to an entire campus or area. (Yes , unbelievably this has been done before... lol)
Microsoft has made the CPU smaller and redesigned the power supply over the last couple of years, has that helped at all? I picked up my first 360 last Christmas, and it's been working fine, but the RROD is always on the back of my mind.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Pray tell, why? A gaming console is merely a dedicated computer. Millions of servers run constantly for years without failing. If the typical failure rate was anywhere near this for a given companies' server, laptop, or desktop computers they would quickly lose market share, yet many people run those at near 100% uptime. Such a number is absurd regardless of usage statistics. Luckily for M$, their customers have come to expect failures and consider them to be a natural and inevitable consequence of the computing experience, and they don't bat an eyelash. It's sad really.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Never had a problem with mine. When I worked for Geek Squad I did see a lot of them coming in with problems though. Seem to have gotten better over time. Didn't Microsoft extend their manufacturer's warranty to account for this? At least they're not turning their backs to the situation.
My 3rd XBox 360 went bad a couple of months ago, and this is the first one that died outside of warranty. I had the option of paying $100 to have Microsoft "repair" it (presumably making it work again, but leaving the flaws that caused it to slowly die in the first place), or I could spend $200 on a new XBox 360 Arcade (which replaces all the parts that are actually broken) and get a fresh 3 year warranty. I chose to buy a new unit, because when you buy a 360, that warranty is the most valuable part of the package. As I see it, I'm not buying the hardware, I'm paying for a 3 year lease on the hardware. I suppose another benefit of buying a brand new unit is that the newer 360 consoles should have less heat-related problems than the originals. So who knows, maybe this one will last a little longer.
Oddly, the only reason I bought a 360 in the first place was because the DVD drive on my original XBox went bad, and I wanted to get a new console and continue playing my original XBox games. Before that, I only bought a new console when I wanted to upgrade to the latest technology. These days, I only buy a new console to replace a broken one (like the PS2 I bought the first time I had to send my 360 in for service).
You fail at reading comprehension. These two statements:
"Even worse news for Microsoft is that only 3.8% said they would buy another Xbox"
"Impressively, only 4% of respondents said they wouldn't buy a new 360 because of hardware failures."
..mean the opposite of each other. It's not about 3.8% vs 4%, it's about whether the 4% of people would or would not buy another console.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
"selection bias" ?
are actually replacements of an existing unit instead of new purchases. In other words, I believe the total is 30M units shipped to date. How many of those units are distinct owners, and how many are replacement boxes?
A large portion of the failed units are simply repaired, but many are repalced. In fact, I'm sure that there are quite a few people who don't bother with the warranty and buy new units (I know many who have).
Except for two problems, you've had no problems?
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The PS3 integrates the PSU, and isn't that large. Now it integrates the PSU and is smaller.
The 360 is an abomination in the world of consumer electronics, less reliable than Panaphonic and Matsashitty and Shoney knock-off brands.
But because it was a little cheaper, the fanboys will rush to covet it. Even as they rue their HD-DVD player purchase, the Plug-n-Charge kit, the Wireless dongle, ... and then you get the RROD, which for my 360 owning friends, has occurred always just as they got the big game they had been looking forward to for ages.
Admittedly if the hardware didn't have such appalling reliability, there wouldn't be a problem, I think more people would own them than they do right now. It's taken three years for the PS3 to become reasonable in terms of price, firmware and game library, I'm impressed they sold over 20m of the expensive model. Still, it is a device that was engineered better, despite that weak GPU they stuck in quite late in the design cycle.
And the Wii, well, it doesn't get played much, but if there's more than one person around it's what is being played.
According to this 5000 respondent survey the failure rate is 54.2%, but the article points out that over 30 million consoles have been sold. I would place little confidence in the 5000 person survey. Who knows what this survey consisted of, was it a simple cookie-based web browser poll where the same person can vote over and over again? Do you really think retailers would put up with 1 out of 2 people returning the XBOX they bought there? And honestly using a blanket percentage for failure rate is just plain ol misleading. We need to know the Mean-Time-Before-Fail figure to really get a handle on the quality. So, I call BS on this whole thing.
Xbox 360s are manufactured and tested by Flextronics at their plant in Guad Mexico, known as Flex-Guad.
It is not the fault of Flex that these units fail, it is the poor design that went into them and Flex doesn't care because they are only paid to build it.
Flex runs many different products through their assembly lines for Cisco, Nintendo, Motorola, Avaya, etc and from TFA, other competitors to Microsoft don't suffer failures.
Xboxs are flawed in so many ways:
1) Restricted airflow over heatsinks using air dams
2) Awful heatsink design and little or no thermal paste between Asic and sink
3) The Asic they use are exposed die with no heat spreader
4) Microsoft tried to design their own GPU and processor themselves and failed miserably and hired a 3rd party to correct it
5) Use of lead free solder on their BGAs (very brittle and prone to low yields)
It is no surprise that many units fail due to excessive playing because the 2 main chips heat up to the point of warping the circuit board itself because it is very thin (cost cutting measure).
Microsoft placed the two hottest chips near the center of the board and it warps due to heat. The solder balls crack when the board warps and you get those lovely E74 failures. Turn it off, let it cool and it works for a bit until it warps again.
That x-clamp strategy used on the heatsinks was wrong to begin with. The newer generation Xboxs use solid bolts instead of these locking pins. If you have ever opened an Xbox you will notice those very LARGE capacitors littering the board which are prone to failure with the heat. I have myself repaired Xboxes and can tell you those caps do not survive the removal process for CPU and GPU.
If you are a PCB designer and get a chance to see the XBox circuit board, you can see that Microsoft really didn't build a proper board. They hired a team of monkeys to cobble together the Xbox and tried to fix thier mistakes 3 board revisions later. Nintendo however, built a really nice board for low cost using proper design practices.
If there was really a 54% failure rate of the Xbox 360 you would have heard about it from retailers long before this unscientific, selection-biased poll came out.
My 5 Nintendo based systems have never failed once (Well the NES can be a bit of pain sometimes, ha ha).
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Godammit!
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Except for a broken leg, a shattered skull and a gunshot to the heart, I'm completely uninjured!
-1 Frothing at the Mouth.
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I've heard about units that get so hot they catch fire. Dear Microsoft: if you're reading this, please send me one of those faulty units. I owe more on my house than it's worth, so you could help me solve some of my problems.
It's strange how it has become acceptable for 360 to behave like this. I don't know any other hardware that people would tolerate 2 major issues within 3 years of the purchase.
I'm not sure where you live. But in Iceland, if you buy and it breaks. We get a new one for free, if it is within two years of purchase, as long as we have done nothing to fault the warranty.
So an Xbox failing for me 18months after purchase, just causes me the hassle of going to argue with some store clerks, and then again to pick up my new one.
Exception Duck - may or may not contain chicken.
When you want to use statistics you have to use a truly random sample if you want your results to be interpreted as valuable.
The sample has to be a truly* random subset of which set, though?
Maybe you want to know stuff about the xbox brokenness experience of heavy gamers, as opposed to that of the general population.
Why might you want that? Well, if you're trying to sell research to a crowd of heavy gamers, you want to sell them something that's says something about them specifically (since heavy usage probably predicts increased breakage level, i.e. what makes that group special actually influences the numbers). It narrows the applicability of the statistics, but also makes it more useful for the narrower set of people. Better or worse? Depends.
Consider this: if you wanted to know how likely you were to get hit with lung cancer, would you look at its prevalence among a random subset of the population, or would you want to look at smokers or non-smokers only (depending on whether or not you smoke)?
* By the way, I assume that in your dictionary "truly random" implies a uniform distribution, which happens to maximize the shannon entropy of the stochastic variable (i.e. the uniform distribution is the "most" random one).
When you feel the temptation to say "your numbers don't mean anything", consider whether you really should be saying "your numbers don't prove that" instead.
In this particular case, self-selection and sample bias for heavy users probably increases the breakage numbers. One should adjust the conclusion accordingly.
it was in local news.... _LOCAL NEWS_ in the NYC metro area in 2007... thats 2 full years ago
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/technology/13iht-13halo.7093255.html
i wage a holy war against the apostrophe.
The only reason for buying an XBOX 360 I can think of is when they include a year's worth of crack or meth. You know that two thirds of those consoles die within a year or two. You know that after three years, the thing is out of warranty and you're out of luck. You know that it's damn loud. You know there's a few consoles out there that last much longer, make less noise, cost less money and don't require a serverfarm-sized air condition to not overheat. And you know there's a tremendous array of laptop and desktop computers that can run PC versions of most console games and much much more, including every piece of USB equipment ever made in the last decade.
Now, what's the kicker on the 360 to throw all that aside?
So somehow between the title/summary and your post, you managed to translate "54.2%" to 2/3?
Better work on that math.