Wii Fails Less Than Xbox, But "Red Rings of Death" Abate
Nintendo’s Wii has outsold rival game consoles. Now a new study says it also outlasts them.
The study by SquareTrade, an independent provider of warranties on electronics, estimates that 2.7 percent of Wiis fail during the first two years of ownership, compared with a 10 percent failure rate over that period for Sony’s (SNE) PlayStation 3 and a 23.7 percent failure rate for Microsoft’s (MSFT) Xbox 360. The Wii failure rate is not just low for a game console, but for any kind of consumer electronics, the SquareTrade study says.
The company said it came up with the results after studying failure reports for 16,000 game consoles purchased by SquareTrade customers.
