After analyzing more than 16,000 new game consoles covered by SquareTrade Care Plans, SquareTrade found that the Wii is 9 times more reliable than Microsoft's Xbox 360 and 4 times more reliable than Sony's Playstation 3.
Looking at the first 2 years of ownership, 2.7% of Wii owners reported a system failure to SquareTrade, compared with 10.0% of PlayStation 3 owners, and 23.7% for Xbox 360 owners.
As expected, the famous RROD (Red Ring Of Death) is the most common Xbox 360 failure. Excluding RROD failures, which are covered by Microsoft's 3-year warranty, Xbox 360 failure rate drops to 11.7%.
SquareTrade believes that the RROD problem is more severe than reported, since most Xbox 360 owners who face it bypass SquareTrade and report it directly to the Microsoft's warranty service. SquareTrade's study noted that while the RROD problem continued to be the major issue for Xbox 360s purchased through 2008, early indications point to the problem abating in 2009.
SquareTrade also found that the most common types of problems seen with the PS3 and Xbox 360 were disc read errors and output issues, and that the Wii had more power and remote control issues than the other 2 systems.