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An independent provider of electronic device warranties has examined data from its own customers to determine the Wii to be the most reliable current console system on the market, and the Xbox 360 the least.
San Francisco-based SquareTrade, which bills itself as "the largest independent warranty provider in the world," compared failure rates of the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii in the first two years of ownership, with a total sample size of 16,000 console units owned by SquareTrade customers.
Within that group, system failures were reported by 2.7 percent of Wii owners, 10.0 percent of PlayStation 3 owners, and 23.7 percent of Xbox 360 owners.
The Xbox 360's infamous "red ring of death"-related problems "continued to be a major issue" for the system through 2008, according to SquareTrade, but have significantly decreased in frequency this year.
Still, somewhat shockingly, even when "red ring of death" problems are removed from the calculation, Xbox 360 is still the least reliable system, narrowly edging out PlayStation 3 with an 11.7 percent failure rate.
Overall, Microsoft and Sony consoles were mainly plagued by disc read and video output problems, whereas the Nintendo console's most troubling area was power-related.
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Interesting, yes? Compare those numbers to the ones provided by the Game Informer readers survey?
PlayStation 3 - 10% versus 10.6%
Wii - 2.7% versus 6.8 %
Xbox 360 - 23.7% versus 54.2 %
I'm a little surprised by the PS3 numbers, to be honest. My original theory was that the Game Informer survey was skewed because its targeting a demographic that can be problem prone, and while I will still mostly stick to that, I have to admit I'm a little surprised. So, yeah, I'm eating a little crow there, and expect to have a few "I told you so" messages in my inbox ;)
The Wii is about where I expected it (and, honestly, where I expected the PS3 to be).
The 360 is significantly lower than the reader's survey, which is perfectly inline with with my theory. Its nice to see that its gone down since the ~33% days, too. Now, if you take out the RRoD issues like they did, the 360 is still too high, in my opinion, but its not nearly as sickening as before. Hopefully that'll get better. I do wish they broke down the 360 by motherboard revision, though. Overall, better than previously reported but still far too high. I hope Microsoft remembers this black-eye when they're designing the 720.
So, the Game Informer readers seem quite able to kill consoles at twice the normal rate except for the PS3 - why is that? Well, and this is going to be grossly stereotyping here, I don't think most of them could afford a PS3! Had as many of them owned PS3s as, say, 360's, the difference between the survey numbers and SquareTrade numbers would've been greater.
Thoughts?
edit: And while I won't say these numbers are gospel or anything, I will say that I trust them a LOT more than I trust the Game Informer ones. I'm still boggled by the PS3 numbers, though. Of course, my view of the hardware is based off of anecdotal information, so I guess I shouldn't be so sure of it.
update: Story now at edge-online.com, also.
update#2: Now here at Gamespot. I really like how they chart the versions of 360 in this story, which is great. I'd like to see a similar chart done a year from now for the PS3 - maybe that 10% will go down, also. Of course, I'd much rather see a breakdown of failures by demographic.
