Xbox 360 Failure Rate Is 54.2% 607
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."
Now we just need to know (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, shocking news (Score:1, Insightful)
In fact, a Game Informer survey of 5,000 readers found that the Xbox 360 has an astounding 54.2 percent failure rate. That means 54.2 percent of Xbox 360 consoles fail in one way or another.
So what you are saying is that 54.2 percent of people who submit a voluntary survey want to bitch and moan about how their Xbox got a RROD in some way or another (never mind the quantity of people who downright abuse the thing by sealing it in a TV console cabinet with no circulation and proceed to play Halo 3 for 10 hours straight).
It turns out that 75% of statistics can't be trusted at all. Oh, and 80% of the time, it works every time.
Re:Missing Details (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
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.
You made a little mistake with one of your details. The article says that only 3.8% of people would NOT buy another xbox due to hardware failures. That's GREAT news for Microsoft - the message is that people love the 360 regardless of failure. I find that surprising and just downright weird, but that's what the respondents said. It might be that this is a result of how they asked their question, however. If they said "Have hardware failures of Xboxes led you to decide not to buy a new Xbox?" and they might have asked that of all 5000, not just the Xbox owners. In that case, all the people who never even wanted an Xbox wouldn't answer yes. For all we know, 3.8% of respondents said that hardware failure made them decide not to buy an Xbox but only 10% ever considered buying an Xbox in the first place.
Impressive? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wow, shocking news (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Missing Details (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that mostly has to do with the fact that
a)Very little console competition (3 major players + two handheld units) and
b)huge sunk costs. your xbox goes belly up. do you a) buy all your games all over again for PS3/Wii? buy new drums/guitars for guitar hero/rock band etc? buy 3 new wireless controllers for the new console? or b) buy a new/used/refurb 360 and keep playing?
If you think about it, the average player probably has $300 in sunk costs in 360-specific accessories or games that they'd have to rebuy.
Re:Impressive? (Score:3, Insightful)
No. Because the use of the word "Impressively" in that context shows author bias, which means that for whatever little weight this had. Close to none to start with, has none now.
Re:Wow, shocking news (Score:2, Insightful)
Flawed Statistically (Score:4, Insightful)
Readers of Game Informer are obviously heavier users of their XBOX360s than the average owner who is casual and does not read any gaming magazines.
When you want to use statistics you have to use a truly random sample if you want your results to be interpreted as valuable.
What we have here is known as a sample of convenience. It was easy for Game Informer to simply poll its loyal readers rather than get a truly random sample of XBOX360 owners.
Might as well ask people at the STD clinic if they have ever had an STD, then extrapolate these results to an entire campus or area. (Yes , unbelievably this has been done before... lol)
But are they getting better? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft has made the CPU smaller and redesigned the power supply over the last couple of years, has that helped at all? I picked up my first 360 last Christmas, and it's been working fine, but the RROD is always on the back of my mind.
Usage stats are irrelevant (100% is standard) (Score:3, Insightful)
Pray tell, why? A gaming console is merely a dedicated computer. Millions of servers run constantly for years without failing. If the typical failure rate was anywhere near this for a given companies' server, laptop, or desktop computers they would quickly lose market share, yet many people run those at near 100% uptime. Such a number is absurd regardless of usage statistics. Luckily for M$, 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.
Re:Missing Details (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
More critically, these results are from a survey and as far as I can tell, the magazine has made little to no effort to account for self-selection bias. That makes this figure pretty much worthless. For those who don't know, self-selection bias is, in this instance, the fact that people who have had failed consoles are more likely to respond to a survey about console failures, than those who have no problems. Thus the sample is not actually representative.
The smoking gun is that the failure rate in this report, for the PS3 is above 10%. Previous reports have put the PS3 failure rate at less than 1%, in which case these numbers are out by an order of magnitude or more.
Re:Missing Details (Score:5, Insightful)
Xbox users play their console more than Wii or PS3 users
My computer is on 24/7. It hasn't failed yet. I expect the same performance out of a game console. 50% failure is unacceptable any way you slice it, and is the reason I have not, and will not buy an Xbox360.
Re:Missing Details (Score:3, Insightful)
Heh... There's a certain expectancy of robustness there with a console (Or, rather, there SHOULD be... ;-) ) and that's just not there and mostly hasn't with either iteration of an X-Box.
I suspect that the crowd's doing the "ooh...shiny" thing and putting up with the unreliable things because "it has the most titles". Sadly, most of the stuff on the X-Box is drek- and the bulk of the stuff I'm interested in has a version for PS3, Wii, or both. I wouldn't buy the 360 based on it's current track record of failures in the field- to be honest, it's not a consideration as much for who's selling it as the failure rates, but either consdieration's enough to scotch the deal in my books.
Has anyone even bothered to google (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder how many of their total shipped units (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Re:Flawed Statistically (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. It's also a volunteer poll, meaning only those who took the time to complete it are counted. Those with a console failure are much more likely to fill out the poll. I'm pretty sure the PS3 failure rate isn't 10% either.
Re:Why no Xbox 360 Slim? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except for two problems, you've had no problems?
Re:problems due to unreasonable design (Score:4, Insightful)
What the hell are you talking about? It's an entertainment console, not a pacemaker. Their liability ends at repairing the consoles - which they have, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
On what grounds could they possibly be "sued into oblivion"? It's not burning down houses or causing incorrect medical diagnoses.
"Instead they just say "nothing to see here... move along. Here's a free repair!" and appease the masses."
I would call that "owning up to the problem". In fact, so would most people. Let's face it - the reason that owners of defective units would buy another one is because Microsoft clearly stood behind their product.
We'll see whether or not Sony will do the same if the PS3 Blu-ray drive failure rates keep climbing.
Re:Missing Details (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just nonsense. Seriously. Maybe you're too young to remember the NES, SNES or Genesis (or older consoles still), but I'm sure many slashdotters are not: who can forget throwing
I'm 27 and I've got a 5-year-old son who is still playing my NES. My brother and I played the hell out of it when we were kids - everything from ripped cables to over-mashed buttons on the controllers. But the console and the controllers still work (with a little electrical tape and cartridge fiddling). I've never heard of an NES failing. I had mine crash once or twice while being left on overnight so we could continue in the morning (no 'save' feature in game), but that's about it!
Now, I can somewhat understand if the failures are due to optical or hard drive failures. Sorta. But 54%? I can see 20% in the first year, sure. But 54% is absurd, especially when you consider that the other game systems (Wii, PS2) have the same device types - and the Wii is likely played by the more abusive "child" player set. (Were they audited in this survey?)
I call BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Now we just need to know (Score:2, Insightful)
If this xbox were to die, I would buy another one. I am considering throwing the PS3 in the trash.
Re:Missing Details (Score:5, Insightful)
well when you get suckered into buying several hundred dollars of games for that single defective console. your choice to is lose all that money or buy another damn console and try to continue.
Me? I have mine in a location that is forced ventilated and I have a screaming pack on the bacl of it sucking out all the heat.
Re:Missing Details (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as your XBOX is within warranty, you can just ship it to MS and get a new one without buying a new one.
So after 3 years, what do you do when your console inevitably dies? I'm still playing consoles over 30 years old, there's no way in hell I'm investing in a console that stands a 50% chance of being worthless after 3 years.
Re:Wow, shocking news (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Usage stats are irrelevant (100% is standard) (Score:5, Insightful)
And quite a lot of those millions of servers are stored in a nice cool and well airconditioned place.
Your average Xbox is however stuffed inside a closet with the rest of the entertainment center.
Re:Missing Details (Score:4, Insightful)
I put my 360 in the box and shipped it back. Two weeks later...new XBox! Total cost: about $1.05 to $1.15 billion. [engadget.com]
there, fixed that.. or not, for you :)
Re:Missing Details (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll be modded down for saying this (I don't care, my karma is excellent and I have no need to whore) but it looks to me like their hardware isn't much better than their software.
They call it "bugs" in software, and "product defects" in hardware. But it's the same thing -- a shoddy product [yimg.com]. You can get away with that when you have a virtual monopoly.
Re:I call BS (Score:3, Insightful)
"One Way or another" is extremely broad and could mean anything from a sticky button on a controller to spontaneous combustion.
Re:I call BS (Score:3, Insightful)
Statistically speaking, the survey would have to be random sampling for that confidence interval.
I personally know some Sony fanboys who would fill out the survey and say their 360 RRODed even though they never owned a 360.
Re:Missing Details (Score:5, Insightful)
The study was poorly done anyway, not so much because of the methods as the measurement used: lifetime failure rates, which will over time hit 100% on any console it's applied to.
I mentioned this in another reply, but the time scale you'd need for a normal console to reach a 100% failure rate would be something like 100-200 years. Seriously. I mean, I have every single major game console of the last 30 years in my house right now, and every single one of them works. The only system that has ever failed on me is the Dreamcast. And yes, I still play them all. (Ok, not equally, but they all get some play.) And I know I'm not alone - there are still many tens of thousands of working Atari 2600's, Coleco Visions, Intellivisions, etc. out there - and the ones that no longer exist are gone not because they broke, but because they just ended up in a landfill somewhere due to perceived obsolescence.
Most game consoles are going to work until they literally begin turning back to dust. If your system is failing due to dry rot, I think you can be pretty sure it's not a design issue that's at fault.
For the Xbox 360 to reach 54% failure in the span of 3 years is pretty unbelievable. I can't think of another product in the history of, well, products to reach that high a percentage. Even when Nintendo did its massive recall of Japanese Famicoms due to a design flaw, the actual failure rate to that point was quite low - under 10%. In most industries, a 54% failure rate would lead to involuntary recall, much less voluntary action. (I'm sure that MS's warranty extension was a bid to head this off. It was done out of fear, not kindness.)
Re:Missing Details (Score:4, Insightful)
The smoking gun is that the failure rate in this report, for the PS3 is above 10%. Previous reports have put the PS3 failure rate at less than 1%
1% is just as ridiculous a number as 54%, if not moreso, because we've all seen widespread reports of 360's failing. But a 1% failure rate of any electronic product is almost unheard-of, especially one with moving parts.
Generally speaking, a failure rate of 5-10% is considered normal. So the PS3's failure rate is slightly high, but I actually wouldn't expect different from a system that was so bleeding-edge at the time it was launched, and that generated such a massive amount of heat and had an unproven cooling system design.
Both the Wii and PS3 have numbers that are basically in the expected range. So those serve as your "control", and any self selection bias would be apparent in those numbers as well. The fact is the 360 numbers are coming from the same survey and are 5 times higher than the PS3 and about 8 times higher than the Wii. And this is not a small sample here either. This is meaningful.
Re:Missing Details (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Missing Details (Score:2, Insightful)
Personal anecdotes aside, do we think that this disregard for reliability is a symptom of our cynical throw away society? I expect electronics to fail. I expect my car to break down. Light bulbs burn out. Etc...
Compare it, perhaps, to cars. Some brands have better reliability ratings than others. But for unquantifiable esoteric reasons, consumers still purchase the unreliable car despite its issues.
There's a lot of MS hate out there, and I certainly understand it to a degree. Their products have problems - lots of problems, but when Windows or my Xbox works properly, they are nice and I like them. I will continue to buy MS products. *shrug*
I, and I suspect many others like me, have been conditioned to accept the fact that certain products that I like will eventually break. That's part of the product cycle. When my XBox broke, I thought, well, it was only a matter of time. I promptly went out and bought a new one.
I'm not trying to defend this mentality. Its generally bad for consumers. But from a theoretical economics point of view, consumers have decided that ( an unreliable xbox 360 + unquantifiable considerations )/price > ( reliable ps3 + unquantifiable considerations )/price.
Re:Missing Details (Score:3, Insightful)
Your numbers are off a little, but your maths are good. 61% of purchasers experienced no failures, not 46%. 46% is the number of consoles, total, that did not fail, which is an irrelevant number for failures per purchase, unless you did the average the other way (total consoles issued, you'd have a bad average then).
The $1 billion with a "b" that MS put up to deal with the issue tells you how costly that 54% (69% per-purchase) fail rate was.
Still, it's about the most used console out there, so they can deal.
Re:Flawed Statistically (Score:3, Insightful)
The failure rate for 360's is OBVIOUSLY too high, by far. I doubt that the rate is truly >50%, though... a little while back, I saw a report from a retail association that said they were getting a 16% return rate.
I would think that close scrutiny of some of Microsoft's financial reporting would give you a better idea of failure rates.
Re:Why no Xbox 360 Slim? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Usage stats are irrelevant (100% is standard) (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you intentionally trying to be dense? Today's very complex systems typically have Mean Time To Failures measured in decades. Most computer systems made today will become obsolete well before they fail, just as the C64 did. The world is full of systems that worked fine as designed without failure, but have been retired to a shelf, museum or landfill. Many of these have moving parts that weren't designed and manufactured with the advantage of today's advanced technologies.
I'm really too busy to address your post any further. You either accept that you are making excuses for shoddy workmanship that don't hold up in the face of empirical evidence, or you just plain refuse to accept the facts. More complexity reduces MTTF but not anywhere near to the observed extent. No explanation or aggregate set of explanations gets around the basic fact that 50%+ failure is more than an order of magnitude too high. Period.
Re:Flawed Statistically (Score:4, Insightful)
Retail return rates are based on the first 30 days or so. A 16% rate there is a significant warning sign.
Retail rates should be closer to 5% as a maximum.
Failure rate after a year should be slightly higher, but not significantly higher. Microsofts numbers are downright disturbing, and makes one wonder how many Shipped units include warranty replacement units; numbers which are used to perpetuate more sales but which may have been significantly skewed by replacement units.
Once users have a significant investments in games for any particular console they are unlikely to switch, inspite of issues.
Re:Missing Details (Score:3, Insightful)
Correct. More accurately, 96% have not been dissuaded from purchasing another Xbox because of system failures.
Re:Quality of the failure not just quantity (Score:3, Insightful)
So somehow between the title/summary and your post, you managed to translate "54.2%" to 2/3?
Better work on that math.
Re:Missing Details (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you played the Halo franchise?
Yep. Still don't understand the hype.
The single-player campaigns were pretty good, but arguably not the best of the genre (an honor which the Half Life franchise seems to have held onto)
Multiplayer was pretty good too, but never really seemed to stand out from Unreal Tournament, or any of the other 5,000 FPS games on the market.
The other problem was that there were *very* few other games worth having that were XBox-only. I'm told that the 360 has a decent collection, which I don't doubt, although Halo always seemed to be the *only* reason you'd want to own a 1st-gen XBox.
I still wonder why it was so successful. Perhaps it was a combination of good timing and good marketing that brought all of the goodies that PC FPS gamers had enjoyed for so many years to a wide audience of adolescent teenagers.* I won't deny that Halo was a good FPS....but it's certainly not everything it's been hyped up to be, and there are definitely good FPSes elsewhere.
*Given Microsoft's apparent target audience, the inclusion of voice chat is particularly inexcusable.