In reliability game, Wii tops scoreboard

Like a ninja with superpowers and a sword of flame, the Nintendo Wii seems to be slaying rivals in ways beyond the TV screen.

The hot-selling Wii console is more reliable than rival Sony PlayStations and dramatically more durable than Microsoft Xbox consoles, according to one survey of 16,000 owners by the warranty company SquareTrade.

The survey numbers weren't kind to Microsoft.

Looking at the first two years of use, just 2.7 percent of Wii owners reported a system breakdown to SquareTrade, compared to 10 percent of PlayStation owners and 23.7 percent of Xbox 360 owners.

In other words, almost one in four Xbox owners reported total breakdowns, which seems to confirm a popular opinion among gamers, as well as the breadth of the dreaded "Red Ring of Death."

The "red ring" failure occurs when three circular lights appear on the console front light at once - signaling a major hardware break that probably means shipping it back to the company.

In an acknowledgement of the problem, Microsoft recently extended its Xbox warranty from two to three years. The company now returns Xboxes almost without question when customers report a red ring failure, and it has set aside more than $1 billion to fund a return program.

The problem, however, may be even bigger, SquareTrade said, as many customers went directly to Microsoft for replacement. SquareTrade suggested a failure rate could be above 35 percent, while some game blogs said it may be more than 50 percent.

This new reliability report comes just before the hugely important holiday spending season during which game console companies make a large portion of their revenue.

A prepared statement from the company said they've fixed problems that have come up: "More than two years ago, Microsoft addressed this issue by extending the warranty to three years for consoles with three flashing red lights. More recently, we extended this coverage to include the E74 error message as well. We continuously invest resources to improve the reliability of our products, and we believe that this issue is largely behind us."

There was one bright spot for Microsoft amid the report. Microsoft has switched some hardware in Xboxes being shipped this year, and newer models appear to hold up better, with less than 1 percent of owners reporting a red ring breakdown.