According to research carried out by warranty provider SquareTrade, almost a quarter of Microsoft"s Xbox 360s fail within two years, leaving it behind the PS3, and the console which proved to be most reliable: the Nintendo Wii. The research was carried out on 16,000 consoles, and all of those were brand new. In addition, failures which were due to accidents were not included.
According to the report, the Xbox 360 has a failure rate of 23.7%, over a time span of two years. The PS3 has a failure rate of 10% over two years, but the Wii beats all of them with a considerably smaller 2.7% failure rate. But even when the usage of each console was considered (as it is reported that Wii users use their console half as much as Xbox 360 and PS3 users do), the Wii still remained at the top, and the Xbox 360 remained in third place.
Unsurprisingly, the "red ring of death" issue accounted for 12% of Xbox 360 failures over two years, with the remaining 11.7% being caused by other problems, such as disk reading and display issues. As for the other consoles, disk reading was the biggest issue reported for the Playstation 3, with power failures being the biggest issue for the Wii.
Naturally, the report isn"t 100% accurate because some Xbox 360 users would have gone straight to Microsoft when they had issues with their consoles. However, for those who want all the juicy statistics, check out the report here.