Nintendo Wii as The Most Reliable Consoles in Gaming Segment

Previously we mentioned about Asus as the most reliable brand in PC market, if you are curious about which gaming consoles are having the most reliable rank, you may be interested on the analysis study conducted on high end gaming consoles. Just recently, SquareTrade, a warranty provider for Consumer Electronics products has published a report summarizing the failure rate of gaming consoles in most recent two years and pointed out that the most reliable gaming console is Nintendo’s Wii among others followed by Sony’s PS3 leaving Microsoft’s Xbox 360 behind.

The analysis report disclosed that Nintendo Wii fallout rate is only 2.7 percent, followed by Sony PS3 at 10 percent and Microsoft Xbox 360 at 23.7 percent for over the first two years. Despite the high failure rate, SquareTrade claimed that the fallout number for Xbox 360 was actually under-stated as there were some failure that being reported by consumers to Microsoft directly without captured by them. Out of the data reported, almost half of the failures were contributed by RROD (Red Ring of Death), with the rest pointed to disc read and display issues. At the same time, the study did emphasize that the console usage could also contribute to the higher failure rate especially in the first two years. Interestingly, the Xbox 360 is claimed to be utilized for average of 1191 minutes per month, followed by PS3 at 1053 minutes and Wii at 516 minutes per month only based on average users.

Nevertheless, Xbox failure rate is expected to decline especially with the Jasper chipset update that supposed to fix RROD issue. Also, there are other factors that make Xbox and PS3 more susceptible to failure as they are using a relatively higher end technology, either in design or manufacturing as well as other mechanical spinning parts such as hard disk drive or optical drive that tends to be less reliable over time.