I don't know about the survey, but I've had 3 Xbox 360 dying on me in the past 6 years and none of them failed because of the RROD.
On the other hand my PS3's been holding for 4 years now.

Surprisingly, I still prefer Xbox over PS3.

firstly, your quoted failure rate is 100% made up. there has only ever been 2 official failure rates given.

1. microsoft said the failure rate was within the acceptable limit - the acceptable limit for consoles/appliances is 3-4% iirc.

2. microsoft said the failure rate was above the acceptable limit and introduced the 3 year warranty. that means that the failure rate hit >3%, meaning even 3.000000000001% was possible.

secondly, 100% of the original Playstations (the first one) built within the first 18 months were faulty due to using a cheap plastic laser eye rail. sony lost numerous class action lawsuits regarding this.

thirdly, a huge percentage of PS2s manufactured in the first few years were faulty too, getting the infamous disk read error. again, sony lost multiple class action lawsuits over this manufacturing fault.

microsoft however have not lost a single lawsuit over RROD, let alone multiple class action ones like sony did. whichever way you look at it, sony made 2 monumental manufacturing mistakes that are each bigger than the RROD.

i personally had all 4 errors - my launch PSs rail warped making it unplayable, my launch PS2 would take 10+ goes to read disks before i replaced it with a slim, my launch 360 got the RROD, and my launch PS3 got the YLOD.

incoming blind disagrees in 3, 2, 1....

@IHateYouFanboys

"1. microsoft said the failure rate was within the acceptable limit - the acceptable limit for consoles/appliances is 3-4% iirc."

2. microsoft said the failure rate was above the acceptable limit and introduced the 3 year warranty. that means that the failure rate hit >3%, meaning even 3.000000000001% was possible."

= Microsoft said this, Microsoft said that.
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

"a huge percentage of PS2s manufactured in the first few years were faulty too, getting the infamous disk read error.

100% of the original Playstations (the first one) built within the first 18 months were faulty due to using a cheap plastic laser eye rail.

100% ? I highly doubt that buddy.

"whichever way you look at it, sony made 2 monumental manufacturing mistakes that are each bigger than the RROD."

If you honestly believe any of those are even remotely close to having MORE THAN 50% of consoles completely dying out. Then you sir, are an idiot :)

"microsoft however have not lost a single lawsuit over RROD, let alone multiple class action ones like sony did."

That still doesn't excuse the fact that it actually happened. Over 50% of 360's exploded.

Nice try at damage control kid. :)

I myself have had 3 360s and this one has been sent off for repairs twice. Never RROD either. But...all replacements and repairs were free. I even got a Jasper model with HDmi as a replacement.

Ps3 Single player, cost
360 multiplayer, interface ease of use

PC - combination of all of the above/troll

i was already a pc gamer but i didn't buy a lot of games.most of my pc gaming time was spent playing battlefield bad company 2 and wow.

steam is what really made me happy with pc gaming :)

Steam makes PC gaming the ruler of them all. So many cheap great games!!!

I got a YLOD after 4 and a half years. I agree. 8 seems statistically unlikely. I remember watchdog (bbc programme) tried to spin the ylod into a bigger problem but were heavily criticised for it due to the vague nature of the findings.

It's called an in store replacement plan. What idiot buys an expensive item without getting one of those? Replacement plans get you a brand new system with out paying any extra money (except for a new plan) better than Sony wanting me to pay 100 bucks to send it out for two months just to get a different console back.

Omg that happened to my friend lol.. He sent his Xbox360 after an RROD (Btw, this was within the first few weeks the 360 was released). Microsoft literally just sent him the same broken 360 back claiming he "tampered" with it. However, he had some game in it that was mysteriously missing when he got the 360 back.

He probably shouldn't have left the game in there... but still. Pretty messed up on Microsofts part.

dont say that
sony fanatics dont want anyone to know this. remember MS bad and always wrong, Sony good and always right.

rinse and repeat, and you will do fine in N4G

Not at first, they didn't. When that first batch of 360s started dying outside of warranty- which was originally just a one-year warranty- people had to buy new systems out of pocket. The three year warranty was announced early July 2007.

The 360 launched November 2005. The one-year warranty for that would have ended November 2006(assuming it WAS a one-year warranty, and not something less, which I can't find any info on). Any systems bought from launch until July 2006 would not have been covered by the warranty, thus people would have had to pay for a new one out of pocket.

July 2007's 3-year warranty was retroactive, meaning it covered every system bought from the day of purchase for three years. That now included replacement systems people bought out-of-pocket; assuming an original one-year warranty, some people were now on their second system. According to various studies- though no information was EVER released by Microsoft- that meant 1/4 to 1/2 of users were on replacement systems.

Assuming a minimum of 6 million and a maximum of 10 million units sold during that first year, and assuming that everyone who experienced a system failure bought a replacement, 25% failure rate would mean another 1.5 million systems(at 6 million the first year) up to 5 million systems(at 10 million). The real number was, obviously, likely somewhere inbetween.

Keep in mind, the extended warranty ONLY covered the RROD(general hardware failure); Square Trade's study- which tested a little over 1000 Xboxes for no more than 10 months, and saw a failure rate of 16.4%, yet predicted these estimates to be "significantly lower" due to the short testing period, and people not reporting- found that 40% of the system failures were NOT covered by the extended warranty: disc read errors, video card failures, hard drive freezes and the like. That's 2/3 as many systems failing from factors that would not be replaced by Microsoft.

People whose systems suffered from these issues would also have had to buy new systems, and assuming everyone who experienced such an issue out of warranty also bought a new system, a few million more would have been added on to the number of systems not replaced for free.

If we take the median possible number of systems from the first year alone that failed (3.5 million) and assume about half as many for the 8 months from November 2006 until the 3-year warranty was announced in July, we get 5.25 million systems that were replaced without a warranty.

But since this is based on an assumption that every system failed outside of warranty, and that every one that did was replaced out of pocket, that number's probably a bit high. It's probably more in the 3-4 million range.

Still, that's about a minimum of 3 million systems that WERE NOT replaced for free. And that's not including systems DURING the 3-year warranty era that broke down and WERE NOT covered. That number, being about 2/3 as many as the covered systems, would mean about another 2 million or so. And the 3-year warranty ended before the Slim came out, so that would increase the number of systems sold that would need to be replaced out of pocket.

All told, a rough estimate of about 5 million systems wouldn't be overkill for re-buys NOT covered by Microsoft.

@ Hicken: That's BS!
The 360 originally came with a 90 day warranty. They didn't extend the warranty till 2 years after release. I know because I had to buy a second one when my first crapped out after a matter of months.

These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse

One game that Sony payed $200 million for. lol
Also, you sure were quick to get triggered. Maybe your the one who needs a hug?

War is causing gas prices to rise. Transport of everything requires gas so the prices of those items go up as well. So it does have an impact

The blockage of the Straight of Hormuz due to the US-Iran war has affected raw components used in semi-conductor manufacturing such as bromine, aluminum, and helium. Iran had attacked the liquified natural gas (LNG) plant in Qatar which is a large producer (1/3 globally) of helium which is used in semiconductor etching. So it's the both the war and the RAM crises.

Contractual agreements are not the same as “gentlemen” agreements. If you think that they work with their distributors a month before production then their entire business model is trash. They work with companies like nvidia constantly for building the graphics cards they need. They work with companies that build motherboards years in advance. This is what proper business planning does.

They are not buying components on a whim like a consumer. So again, considering the ram isn’t a singular module and is integrated into the motherboard I highly doubt they wouldn’t have a final schematic that they are supposed to be building around.

If they are delaying production another 3 years then it’s obvious again this is an after though project and is just trying to be responsive to their bad execution they had the last 14 years.

It also isn’t far fetched to use their failure to produce first party titles the last 7 years including the highly anticipated games I mentioned all being cancelled. That they would continue to you know… lie

Yeah with FSR 5 they should be able to offer a much cheaper version of Helix.

Series S is what has killed Xbox Series so... Will they dare?

The factors are largely external. Covid and Russia-Ukraine war causing inflation led to the first price increase in 2022.

Then we get Trump's tariffs increasing hardware prices, AI boom causing a RAM crisis, war on Iran causing a worldwide fuel crisis which impacts the cost of everything.

Gaming doesn't exist in a vacuum. The last few years have been a shitshow and lot of it was definitely avoidable.

LucasRuinedChildhood,

For sure. No disagreement on the external factors doing a lot of this. Where I have to gently push back however is on two fronts:

1. The pandemic definitely caused some issues: asynchronous development was a big issue and really complicated timelines and affected game quality. At the same time, when it comes to price hikes, it's really difficult to know what was genuine necessity and what was taking consumers for a ride. The pandemic brought about "stag-flation" which was increasing prices and stagnant wages, which was a problem caused by supply chain constraints. There was also "Greed-flation", where companies that were slightly affected or had no issues took advantage of the situation and squeezed everyone citing supply chain issues when there were none.

2. It's definitely true that the tariffs, AI boom, and RAM crisis were all things enabled by tech broligarchs throwing money at this caricature of a world leader, one of them being Satya Nadella. I don't think Sony and Nintendo have contributed much to this problem if at all, but Microsoft's Nadella I feel was instrumental in causing every one of those issues. Microsoft as a company contributed to both candidates (though they gave Harris 4x as much if I recall), but Nadella was all in on letting AI run wild. He paid for unregulated AI, and got a war that's not a war (even though Trump called it that at least five times on television) that screwed up helium access. So for me, I feel that one of the players in the gaming industry is a key architect of these issues, and for that reason I struggle a bit to think of it as "external".