Seventy Percent Failure Rate

Submitted by Paul Munn on March 7, 2008 – 3:00 pm11 Comments

CAGCast CheapyD mentioned while our distinguished guest on Aeropodcast 24 that he had posted a new poll asking Xbox 360 owners if their consoles had failed. On CAGcast 110 this week he reveals the results. Out of a whopping 3000-plus respondents to his poll — all of whose responses are made public and are site registrants — the percentage of users whose Xbox 360 had died was nearly 60%. Sixty percent! He goes on to say that if you count the number of units that had died the system failure rate is actually 70% due to some people having had multiple 360′s die on them.

This is a stupendous number, something that CheapyD and Wombat readily admit is a horrendous embarassment to Microsoft. The kicker? They still haven’t fixed the problem yet. Apparently the Falcon motherboards being put into the refurbished Xbox 360′s are to some extent experiencing the RROD, but the jury is still out as to how much more reliable the new design is than the old one.

As you learned during our podcast, CheapyD did opt to send in his Japanese 360 for repair and he tells the story of its pickup and when he expects to see it again during the CAGcast.

Source: CAGcast 110.

Tags: cag, CheapyD, refurbished

Richard Windsor

Polls like that are usually fanboy bait. You might as well just make up statistics on the fly, you would have as much of a chance of being right.
http://www.eklipse.net morphiend

They are, but I’d err on the side of close to correct with his findings. From the shallow pool of people I know with 360s, 2 out of 6 have had failures. Now when you put that further into perspective that those 2 units are the ones w/ HDMI and probably aren’t used “that often” (we work too much) that its seems dead on for the number of failures.
http://www.farbot.com/ Paul Munn

While Cheapy readily admits that this is not a scientific poll, he made sure to have only registered members of the site be able to vote AND that he would publish everyone’s votes. Both measures were taken to try and dissuade people from bs-ing the poll. I think publishing responses might let the more militant folks audit the results by searching the forums for posts by the voters to back up their claims.

Of course some skewing happened, and someone probably voted one way or another, but 3000 respondents is not a tiny sample size. Until now failure rates have been highly anecdotal. I’m guessing the honest response rate is high primarily because people are frustrated with not being able to play their games while waiting for repairs.

Speaking of which Cheapy did remark during the CAGcast that he had Army of Two for the Xbox 360 sitting on his desk waiting for his 360 to come back from repairs, and he said that he would buy GTA IV for the Xbox 360, “assuming my system lasts long enough to play it”.
Sifer2400

the result are too skewed to be compared to 17 mill 360s out there or w.e for all he knows all the gamers with red rings posted on the vote but the number is high deff not 70% maby 33% so like 1 out of every 3 fails ? my second 360 red ringed as soon as i opened it i was pissed and returned it the next day to MS.
http://www.farbot.com/ Paul Munn

So Sifer that basically means getting a 3rd Xbox 360 back puts your failure rate at 66% already. If the 3rd dies you’re at 75% on the 4th. If that one goes you’re up at 80%.

Do I think everyone who responded got 3 dead Xbox 360s? That seems awfully high to me.

Reminds me of the guy at Kotaku whose refurbished 360 red-ringed when he tried syncing a controller to it right out of the box.
Richard Windsor

We could promise to hunt down and kill anyone who votes the wrong way and that would have no effect on the poll whatsoever, so why would anyone care othewise? This is the internet, reality doesn’t exist in polls. If we are to believe reports that the overall failure rate is between 15-20% which is unacceptable then how can a skew so high as 70% be reasonable. I have 3 Xbox 360′s and have returned none. I have about 8 friends who all have 360′s and 1 of them has gotten the RROD. I don’t doubt that many people have had multiple consoles die, but in the end I think a greater sample rate would bring the number back down to what it probably really is. If the overall failure rate was more then 50% MS would have needed to put aside much more then 1.5 billion dollars for repairs and replacement.
Paul Munn

Why on earth do you have three Xbox 360′s if they’re all working just fine?
http://www.aeropause.com Stephen Munn

He’s using them as an alternative heating source, Paul.
Sifer2400

the thing is only one of my consoles red ringed i manually broke the first one’s disk drive trying to remove it i didnt want to fix it so i juts got a new one
Sifer2400

lol there no heat in his house lol
used cisco

Obviously this is not a scientific poll and the result are not likely very accurate. HOWEVER, one would have to be an idiot not to recognize that an ENORMOUS number of 360 have failed and are still failing. I read MANY gaming websites, and listen to a lot of podcasts. I honestly can’t think of a single major gaming site or podcast that doesn’t have coverage on their personal RROD’s. Multiple writers at Kotaku, IGN, 1up, Gamespot, Joystiq, etc have had failures. Are they fanboys? Are they liars? I doubt it.
One writer at Kotaku has chronicled his multiple failures, something like 6 if I recally correctly. I’m not saying the 70 percent figure is accurate, but based on my rather extensive anecdotal evidence, I would not be surprised if that number ended up being pretty close. For the record, 4 of the 6 360 owners I know have had a failure, although, not all were RRODs.