We have all heard stories of flawed product designs leading to rampant failures through the years from different industries. In the video game industry, the XBOX 360 is the pinnacle as a product whose ‘lack of failure’ is more of a surprise than having to return it to the manufacturer! Recently Game Informer magazine conducted a survey of owners to example the trends more closely.

There are three major areas the study reported on:
- Failure Rate: as stated, nearly 55% of XBOX360 systems have failed according to owners. This is in stark contrast with 10.6% PS3 failure rate and 6.8% for the Wii. Also, Microsoft takes up ~4 weeks to turn-around the system, whereas Sony and Nintendo have their customers up and running again in about a week.
- Customer Service: people dislike Microsoft’s service. Only 37.7% of X360 owners found Microsoft’s service ‘very helpful’ when addressing product failure issues, compared to 51.1% for Sony and 56.1% for Nintendo.
- Playability and Repeat business: despite the high failure rate, mediocre service and slow repairs, only 3.8% would never buy an XBOX 360 again.

That last one is fairly staggering – people are buying a product which is more likely than not to break, leading to long and unpleasant discussions with outsourced customer service reps and a multi-week wait to get their system back and running … yet scant few are upset enough to not buy another one.

No doubt this is correlated to the fact that the X360 is the most highly played console of the generation in the US (though not the highest selling). The study recounted recent data showing that more than 40% of XBOX360 owners play three to five hours a day, compared with 37% for PS3 owners. Wii owners are least likely to be heavy users, with 41% using their systems less than one hour a day.

So what does this say about console owners? Perhaps what it says is that despite all of the complaining on web forums and blogs, if a system has good games people will tolerate problems and failures they otherwise wouldn’t.

Source: Game Informer (print only) via Consumerist