Red Ring of Death…but Microsoft doesn’t care
Well well well……..
The time has come for me.
My Xbox 360 has died, I have the ill fated but widely known 3 flashing red lights. It is known in the gaming community as the ‘Red Ring of Death,’ anyone with any type of video game experience is familiar with the term.
Yesterday when the red lights began to flash, my first thought was….”Wow that took a long time to happen.” I have had around 6-8 friends who have experienced a Red Ring of Death, a few twice and one unlucky friend has burned through 3 Xbox 360s.
Needless to say its not a fluke or ‘user error.’
In the early months after the console’s launch, Microsoft stated that the Xbox 360’s failure rate was within the consumer electronics industry’s typical 3% to 5%. Nevertheless, Microsoft has never released its official statistics on the failure rate of the various versions of the console; the company’s press relations policy is “to focus on the prompt resolution of any technical problems.”
At the Game Developers Conference in February 2008 Microsoft did announce that the “Failure rate has officially dropped”, but would not mention any specifics. Later in the month Square Trade published an examination of 1040 Xbox 360s and said that they suffered from a failure rate of 16.4% (one in six). The study continues to say that of the 171 failures, 60% were due to a general hardware failure (which is the 3 flashing lights, and thus fell under the 3 year extended warranty). And of the remaining 40% which were not covered by the extended warranty, 18% were disc read errors, 13% were video card failures, 13% were hard drive freezes, 10% were power issues and 7% were disc tray malfunctions. The company also stated that its estimates are likely much lower than reality due to the short time span of only 6-10 months of testing.
So while I counted myself a lucky few that have not experienced the dreaded Red Ring of Death, I know consider myself unlucky to have not ever had any issues.
My console is one of the originals to ever be created, with a manufacturing date of January 23rd 2006. Every one I tell states they are shocked it hasn’t happened earlier. Yes Microsoft did extend the warranty to 3 years, but I bought my console in late June 2006. While your math wheels turn I’ll save you the trouble and tell you that I am just over a month shy of being in warranty. It seems like a classic example of what happens with your car the moment it goes out of warranty, and we all know how stickler car companies are with their warranty coverage, just looking for a reason to call it ‘not covered by warranty’.
I tried to to fill out the request using Microsoft’s Xbox Support online and fill out the detail portion about my Xbox to find out my 360 is out of warranty. There is a button on the website that says “dispute warranty”. Shows how many problems and issues that occur they felt the need to put a button on the website that says ‘DISPUTE WARRANTY.’ I am directed to call their support number.
The first thing as soon as I call is a recording, (that mind you is around 3 minutes long and you have to listen to the whole thing before being able to talk to anyone…but i digress from my pure hatred of phone recordings and menus)…after telling me I can manage payment online, the recording immediately explains if I have 3 flashing lights I can fill out the warranty request form online. Again such a pre-dominant issue that a company will openly tell you about a problem without you even asking about it!
Through a long drawn out process I was finally able to discuss with someone the issues I was having. It took the representative all of 2 minutes to shuffle through a few lines before going straight to the script of, “I’m sorry this is out of warranty and there is nothing we can do to cover this.” Xbox Support wanted $100 or $120 over the phone for them to fix the issue. I asked to speak to a supervisor hoping to explain myself again and re-iterate that this being a well known issue, I would hope for leniency being just over a month out of warranty.
While I was told I had been transferred to a supervisor he gave me the same answers even though I made a finely pointed case as to why an Original Xbox 360 rampant with issues should be covered.
Well, at this point it seems I’m out of luck, after running in circles for another 5-10 minutes I had had enough of talking to a broken tape recorder and kindly disconnected and hung up.
So again I say that all this time I’ve thought I have been lucky to not have any issues with my Xbox 360, secretly reveling in the fact that mine is still working and feeling relief of not having to deal with issues, while my friends have had to deal with the issues on multiple occasions.
It turns out I’m the one that got the short end of the stick here, and the most widely known hardware failure in video game console history on one of the original batches of Xbox 360’s will not be covered and I was dismissed and treated as an expendable customer.
Microsoft knows they can ask for $100 to fix the console and not bat an eye because what else am I going to do. I have 20 games and friends on XBox Live to occupy spare time.
The question is now, do I spend the $100 to fix an issue and only have a 1 year warranty, or do I get a new one and have a 3 year warranty? I’ve been scared of this issue since I first starting hearing about it 2 years ago. Disappointing to hear about then and now even more disappointing to hear Microsoft won’t do anything about it.
D A N N Y