Many Xbox 360s fail within three months

Electronics warranty firm SquareTrade has already claimed that the Xbox 360 has a 16.4 per cent of breaking down, but more stats released by the firm show that the console is most likely to fail during its first three months of use.

The figures are based on its recent study into Xbox 360 failures, which examined 1040 warranties sold made regarding the Microsoft console between 1 April 2007 and 31 July 2007. Of the 171 people who filed claims on their warranties, 102 were caused by the infamous Red Ring of Death(RRoD).

Disc read errors accounted for 18 per cent of the additional 69 claims made to SquareTrade, in addition to 13 per cent for video card failures and the same figure for frozen hard drives. Power problems and disc tray malfunctions also accounted for ten per cent and seven per cent, respectively. Other, lower-scoring failures included overheating without the RRoD, and controller problems.

SquareTrade’s sample size consisted 956 owner of the Premium Xbox 360, while only 57 came from folk who own the Core console and the remaining 27 for the flagship Elite. Why did so many Premium owners take out extra warranty coverage?

The company boasts that most of the problems, such as disc tray malfunctions, wouldn’t have been covered by Microsoft’s extended warranty, which was increased from one year to three in order to cover RRoD-related problems – a ‘goodwill’ gesture that’s estimated to have cost Microsoft more than $1bn (£500m/€650m).