Pick the "next gen" console I should purchase

[jokerthief]

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I'm in the same situation as the OP. One thing I haven't seen in this thread it the failure rates of the Xbox. The red ring of death. I've heard that it affects 1/3 of Xboxes. Is the PS3 more stable or does it have issues as well?

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approx. 30 percent of 360's are showing defects compared to one half of one percent of ps3's

thats .30 compared to .005

numbers like that dont lie folks [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img]

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a. please cite source
b. OP is considering buying a new xbox console, the newer ones are less prone to failure than the old ones

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Please cite source.

[blackize]

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For me it may be the deciding factor because of my past history with bricked consoles. The reasoning is that I don't want to buy either of them right now and am going to continue to wait at least a half year before making a decision. I'm waiting for both companies to iron out their technical difficulties. By the time I decide to buy, the PS3 may have caught up to the Xbox in terms of quality games.

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Yeah I understand. The failure rate is a reason not to buy a 360 until the failure rates come down.

Whether your 360 fails or you buy a PS3, it doesn't matter. Either way you won't be playing games!

[Thanir]

Googling '360 failure rates' shows numerous articles mention a 30% failure rate on 360's. Most reference an EB manager who claim that at one stage they were getting calls everyday about problems, and that the 'failure rate must be well over 30%'. Just browsing through a few articles, most seem to have the same source, and no hard numbers have ever been shown. It does seem that while 30% might be high, the problem rate is much higher than the 2-3% ms claims.

Also in the same blurb from the EB manager he acknowledges that the failure rate has come down (less returns.)

[ThaSaltCracka]

I know of one person who has had the problem.

[vulturesrow]

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I know of one person who has had the problem.

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Of all the people I personally know that have an Xbox 360, exactly one has had the problem. Id guess I know about 20 people personally that have Xbox 360s. So that makes the failure rate 5%!!! [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]

[Phoenix1010]

It's definitely not a non-issue. Sure it's easy enough to get it replaced but it was still a pain in the ass to not have it for a month and I missed the Halo3 launch because of it. But yeah, the fact of the matter is it's not at all close enough between 360/PS3 for this to even register on the scales.

[JuntMonkey]

I only know two people who have it that I can think of. At least one of them had the problem, so the failure rate is at least 50%, possibly as high as 100%.

[Dire]

I'm also in the camp of knowing exactly one person of about 20 who's had a problem. Anecdotal evidence and all, but something has always stood out - the majority of people never have a problem, but then there are these people that go through like 3+ consoles in a short period of time. Can't help but assume there's some user level environmental influence of some sort, but at the same time I doubt somebody's going to be dumb enough block ventilation, keep it in a high temperature area or whatever after they fry multiple consoles doing so.

And there's no real way of measuring failure rates. Online surveys will not only suffer from obvious response biasis of legitimate responses, but also simply false responses due to the fanboyesque nature of the topic. And Microsoft is unlikely to ever give a nonrelative (eg - 'less than', etc..) response.

From a gaming perspective, it's pretty much a nonissue. But I think it's extremely interesting from a business perspective in it's impact and how MS has handled it. I'm not really sure if they've been succesful or not.

[Phoenix1010]

Waiting may or may not be a good idea. 360's keep getting more and more stuff to make early adopters feel like idiots, and PS3s keep losing stuff to bring the price down. How are people who get a 360 in a couple months going to feel when the built in HD-DVD model drops next year? And how are people who don't get a PS3 now going to feel when it finally gets good games but all the extra features have been dumped next year?

[MikeSmith]

if you get an hdmi 360 you should be have no failure rate, 360 has better games period but ps3 is starting to have better games come out but the big problem i see is the lack of backward compatibility, its best games ever god of war 1 and 2 and guitar heroes wont be playable and you are stuck hanging yourself in front of the lair menu.