Xbox 360 hit hard as research slams its reliability

According to recent research carried out by SquareTrade, the Microsoft Xbox 360 is the most unreliable games console on the market, with 23.7 per cent of all owners reporting issues with their console to the company.

According to the findings, 23.7 per cent of all Xbox 360 owners reported a system failure to SquareTrade, compared to 10 per cent of all Playstation 3 owners and 2.7 per cent for Wii owners.

SquareTrade claim that Microsoft’s poor score is mainly due to the ‘Red Ring of Death’ error which has plagued the console in recent years. If this issue didn’t occur, SquareTrade estimates that 11.7 per cent of all its console owners would report a failure.

But this figure could be even higher due to the fact that a large proportion of Xbox 360 owners reported the problem directly to Microsoft, therefore bypassing SquareTrade. According to their research the failure rate could be as high as 35 per cent.

In good news for Nintendo, its Wii console seems to have performed exceedingly well with only 2.7 per cent of its owners reporting a failure.

But you have to keep in mind that the Nintendo Wii has been proven to be used for considerably less time than its competitors and SquareTrade highlighted this fact.

SquareTrade makes reference to a recent Nielsen report which highlights that Wii owners use their console roughly half as frequently as Xbox 360 and PS3 users. According to its findings the Xbox 360 is used for an average of 1191 minutes a month, followed by 1053 for the PS3 and only 516 for the Wii.

This therefore explains the significantly lower failure rate, but overall SquareTrade believes it is still the most reliable console on the market.

Some of the most common failure issues reported on the current cycle of next generation consoles (besides the RROD error) include: disk read, disk tray, display/output, feezes, power, control device and the E74 error.

SquareTrade concluded the report by commenting that since the RROD error was discovered by Microsoft its reliability has improved dramtically and as of August 2009, only 1 per cent of users have reported instances of the error. But later reports will shine a brighter light on the issue.