Failure. It’s not a concept that any company wants to have associated with their products. Just look at the furore surrounding Toyota’s recent accelerator-happy death traps on wheels. Turns out, people like it when their cars stop when they tell them to.
Similarly, people like it when their games consoles work. I was very unhappy, as a young ‘un, when I managed to spill strawberry milk into my Gameboy Colour, promptly and unceremoniously killing it. I was equally unhappy when my PS2 decided it preferred to produce disk read errors rather than operate on top of my booming soundsystem’s basslines.
But those were my fault. The Xbox 360, however, is another matter. The 360 is a better investment in the long term as a doorstop than it is a games console. They simply don’t stop breaking.
This is the part where I’d usually tell you about the mate of my mate’s who’s been through eight 360s in four years (true story). But there’s no need. Because as it turns out, the recent results of a survey of gamers by No Fuss Reviews.com has resulted in some shocking evidence.
Of the 500,000 surveyed, the number of Wii owners that needed a repair is an impressive ‘less than 1%”. For PS3 players, that number jumps to a worrying 8% (that’s 800 people in every 10,000 consoles – far too many). But the 360? A staggering 42%. That’s almost half of all 360 owners. For ‘3 repairs or more’, the number is still an unbelievable 39%.
39%!? So, over a third of Xbox 360 buyers will need to have their console repaired three times or more? It's not even five years old yet. Compare that to the PS3’s 2% or the Wii’s 0% and the figure seems inexcusable.
These kind of failure rates are simply unfathomably huge. When you consider that the 360 has sold nearly 40 million, it must be considered that a shade over 16 million of those will break. That’s a lot of unhappy customers.
Surely, then, the Xbox 360 is the Toyota of the games industry – except Microsoft haven’t reacted to try and rectify the situation, haven’t apologised and, er, haven’t even fixed it yet, as new 360s still seem to die as easily as the old models did. Great.
Obviously, I’m not having a go at anyone who did buy a 360 – and there are a lot of people out there, more than the PS3 – but you have to wonder whether those customers would have stumped up a bit more cash for Sony’s offering if they knew about the appalling failure rates of Microsoft’s console. It’s a great console because of its wealth of excellent exclusives – Halo, Forza and Gears of War, to name just a few – and its frankly brilliant online service and achievement system. But technically speaking, it’s not a great console. It’s a dreadful, rushed, noisy, ugly beige box prone to random death at any moment, made viable as a purchase only for the efforts of Microsoft and other developers in furnishing the console with a ton of games and features at an affordable price. If the fragile Xbox had to get by with PS3’s early range of games and online services, it would be long dead.
People should not have to put up with it, though. Sony’s system has caught up in most regards, and excels in some others (Hello, Uncharted 2). Microsoft should be made to pay the price for rushing an untested system to market knowing they’d just have to fix them all later.
I love gaming, and that’s why I can’t love Microsoft. Go and make a console that I can actually game on, consistently, and I'll buy it instantly. But I can't accept the inherent faults built into half of all Xboxes, and other gamers shouldn't have to, either.
PS3 all the way
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