The hugely scientific console reliability poll

Yet funnily anywhere you go and ask a bunch of people how is their X360 doing and you get high % for failed units... How do you know it doesn't show on finance reports, they are doing loss constantly and it seems the refurbishing might not eat as much money as one might think.

Due to the time on the market it's pointless to try to make accurate comparisons to other consoles at this point. The poll does however show that very high percentage of X360s owned by beyond3d posters have broken. I think that's more solid evidence than your "It just can't be true" line.

 

Typical... Where is honestly the logic to support that Microsoft is having as big of a problem that these polls say? Besides whining on the Internet and random polls there honestly is none saying the issue is 10%+ defect rate size. Even if it cost Microsoft only $100 to repair 1 million consoles you're still talking a ton of money, or 2 million if some honestly want to think its 20%. Heck, even if its 5% the writing on the wall would still be there. Microsoft had a loss of $300~ million for the gaming division last I saw, what does that put the numbers at? Sure not 10%+.

Instead of going "People on the Internet's say so!", I would much rather see some further information... there is none. I strongly do believe the Xbox 360 defect rate is significantly higher than the PS3 or Wii, but once again if it were as high as some are claiming then there would be MUCH more evidence then some poll...

 

On one quarter... and 100$ for repair is not only, that's quite a lot of money if they only put more thermal paste in there etc. even with shipping both ways.

 

This is beyond3d, a site dedicated to talk about computer graphics, most people here are so called "graphic-whores"

 

While I didn't vote given that I own none of the above consoles at all, I can tell you one thing with the purported 3-5% failure rate on the 360. That's actually approximately the same failure rate we've seen here in the office when it comes to the devkits/debug kits.

PS3 devkits back when they were the older, much, much, much, much, much, much louder, 4 kilos heavier, and 800 MHz slower, and had no disc drive were just rife with problems and were very fidgety about the smallest things. The new ones are basically problem-free... so far.

To be fair, nobody has any PS3 *test* kits here, and its those which are closer to their retail counterparts so there's a sort of a bias there. Comparatively, all the 360 kits differ only internally (RAM, hard drive, OS, firmware) compared to their retail counterparts (well, the devkit has that dunce cap) -- they are otherwise basically the same.

 

Yet they lose money in other areas and yet that still would not be enough considering numbers. If just the majority were thermal paste issues then Microsoft has some how picked the worst thermal compound in history..... which I strongly doubt. Instead of blindly taking the "It must be greater than they say!" look maybe you should try on the "What evidence is there to back up that they are lying". A internet poll would never pass as a real data source...

 

It is suprising that nobody touches the meaning of "failure rate" here. Is it "failure rate" within the first month or is it "failure rate" within the first year or is it "failure rate" within life time (e.g. 5-6 years)?

I have a number of friends who owns 360, and the earliest adopters among us (me and a one of those friends) have a broken 360. Mine is a launch one, I am a causal player who plays 0.5-1 hour/day on average and the longest gaming session I have is probably less than 5 hours. After 6 months, it showed its first glitches, but nevet stalled completely. Now after 16 months, it got died after showing too many glitches for the last couple of days. My other friend got his two months after the launch. Played it for 4-5 months like crazy, and then, it went dead. His repaired one is working fine for the last 5 months. My other friends who bought it more recently have not had any problems so far.

My guess is MS improved the reliablity significantly after October time frame. Ppl who own these consoles usually observe quiter drives, cooler operation, etc. For the ones who bought before these dates like me, I guess the broken/repaired consoles will go back-and-forth between MS and us for a while until they sent us a new unit which is manufactured recently (I heard that after consoles make two trips to repair center, they send a new one).

I think what MS needs to be careful about is not short term money loss but about the brand reputation on reliability. These consoles manufacturing cost/retail price will come down eventually. These 200$ difference between premium consoles from MS and Sony will not stay the same forever. Once, both of them make to the 200$ price point, "reliability" will be one of the purchase decision factors, and MS will not fare good on this one. Even if you improve on that significantly or have the best customer service, it is hard to correct the bad word once it is out. I believe the sooner they fix this the better for them in long term.

 

It's not just a poll, but a much wider range of 'voices' that are complaining about defect X360's. Do you honestly believe that there isn't a problem, that the failure rate of X360's is normal?

If you do believe this, then are you saying that

X360 failure rate = normal/average
PS3 failure rate = very low / much better than average.
Wii failure rate = very low / much better than average.

 

A 5% failure rate would not be remotely normal or average for being this early into its lifecycle. I think we're saying that it is definitely bad, but 5% is bad, and there is no hard evidence to support the 20% sky is falling speculations.

 

Would you like to give me an analysis and a breakdown of these numbers.

Well I have said that the early units most likely are the main problem here and for example units that are bought today will suffer nowhere near the same failure rate as the early units. Naturally over time the overall failure rate will be lowered because of that.

 

I’d be interested to know how many of these dead 360s were launch consoles.

My launch 360 died after just over a year and was repaired for free. I’m guessing that a lot of the people who frequent gaming message boards like this one are early adopters; which might skew these results a bit. I’d assume that outside of that initial dodgy batch, the death rate is much more acceptable.

All 360s manufactured before the 1st of January 2006 are covered for life, right?

 

Wow , 104 people have/had Xbox 360 and %50 of them have/had problems ...

For PS3 , 5 of the 65 PS3s has/had problems which means % 8 ...

And for Wii , 4 of 33 has/had problems , %12 ...

Xbox 360 has 4 times of Wii's and 6 time of PS3's failure rates ...

These are not the exact / general failure rate of the consoles thats for sure but I'm pretty sure of that MS's %3 - 5 statement is completely BS ...

Best post of the thread ... I hope you have extended warranty ...

 

I wouldn’t be surprised if the failure rate for those launch 360s was well over 50%, though I doubt it’s much more than 5% over all. I’m pretty sure that launch consoles are still replaced for free outside of the warranty.

 

What? I'm claiming around 5% defect rate, which is actually rather bad, you're the one claiming the truly wild numbers. You've yet to offer ANY support for your argument yet you want me to support mine by breaking down numbers that do not need to? Simple math alone shows that claims of 20% are impossible.

Exactly. I've stated a number of times that the Xbox 360 defect rate is higher than that of the PS3 or Wii, the defect rate stated by Microsoft themselves at around 5% is very bad. My comments on that however are completely ignored and then people have the guts to turn around and try to twist the words as if I never said that. Its amazing.

 

I'll change my view on that one, 5% is not normal. It is bad. I would say the PS3 has a slightly lower than normal, Xbox 360 higher than normal and Wii probably normal. Yet... no hard evidence to support any of this other than Microsoft's comment on the 3%~5%. I would say that PS3 units at launch were made much better than the Xbox 360 ones and it honestly is hard to judge Wii numbers because ownership on the forums I visit is not exactly spread evenly towards the Wii spectrum.

 

I'm not even going to get into speculating the failure rate, im just going to explain to you why poll's on websites are largely useless for anything:

I'm going to start this of by a little example:

Have you ever seen a political debate show where people can call in and vote on stuff? Like say "Legalize abortion, yes or no". Now, some of these programs are very popular, getting hundreds of thousands of callers during a show. In this particular example, a program in Norway named Tabloid, asked the question if the government should stop allowing so many immigrants to settle in Norway. Shockingly 80% of the callers (50,000 total callers (total population in norway is 4.5 million) said that we had enough immigrants as it is.

Now on the day after this show was on, a analytical firm that does polls, had also done a poll on the same issue. They got a 30% number for the "no immigrants people", they only polled 3,000 people though. Guess which one is more scientifically accurate? You guessed correctly, the smaller, professional poll, because the people who watch "Tabloid" on a friday night and call in, aren't representative of the general public.

In order to have statistical data of ANY scientific value you need to make sure that the people who are responding in your poll are representative as an average of all the consumers who are using this product. Not only that, but these polls also need to have the "right" questions, you can easily manipulate the results of a poll, by just slightly changed the question or the answers.

We on the same page so far? Good.

Now, lets take at the polls your discussing. Are the people answering this poll representative of a the average gamers? No they are not. The most people who own this console are not spending their time on forums. Further, the average gamer will probably be using his console very differently than the average guy at a gaming forum. They will most likely spend less time playing, this alone leads to a lower score for the reliability than it should be. (Because obviously, since the average player plays less than the forum voter, they will most likely have consoles that are still alive).

Not only that, but the results can also largely be flawed, because of people lying, as we know in this generation fanboy wars on forums are taken to the next level. It happens everywhere, even here on beyond3d (tho to a lesser extent, but its still easy to spot biased posters [they usually have a little red dot below their name]), anyways, nobody is preventing these people to vote as well. And if you look at the amount of people who talk about how much better GT5 will be over Forza 2 at the Forza 2 forums on GameFAQs, there is little doubt that some people will post "negative" values to consoles they have never owned.

Further, are we sure the pollers are voting correctly? Most of these questionares are "Has your X360 broken down?" Now, just take a look at the B3D poll, you can already tell its flat out wrong. Why? Because most people are only voting once, they vote "Yes my x360 has died". They dont vote that their current X360 is alive and well. And 99,9% of everybody who has had a dead x360 has gotten a replacement, but if you cannot vote for both, how on earth are you going to get anything that is remotely accurate?

After all, what you want here is the % of how many consoles that brake down right?

Surely, if you had a x360, and it dies, and you receive a replacement that works. Thats 50% reliability rate, NOT 100%.

Because of all these facts, using website polls to make any real life conclusions is well... to put bluntly, its stupid. With that being said, i would presume that the rate of broken X360's is high for a console, but certainly not as high as this poll shows.

 

I think a professional survey would use MTBF. e.g., even though my PS3 is only 5 months old, it survived longer hours (more gruesome workload due to Folding perpectually) than an equally old 360 or Wii that runs for short hours.

 

Didn't I explain that already?