Microsoft Xbox 360 Sales Plunge 60% As Problems Mount

[davygee]

Another farcical experience of the 360 from Kotaku:

As of last night I have officially had nine Xbox 360s die on me, which means when I get this replacement, I will be on my eleventh Xbox 360 (counting debugs and retails).

Over the weekend we had a little neighborhood party at my house and in the midst of it I decided to show off Guitar Hero II for the Xbox 360. We played it for a bit, maybe 30 minutes and then I went to turn the 360 off and turn the music back on. When I pressed the power button on my Xbox 360 Elite it started making sounds like a blender. This lasted about 10 seconds and then it powered off. I found the news a little bizarre, but didn't think anything of it until Sunday night.

Last night I found a bit of free time on my hands and went down to the 360 to finally check out Vampire Rain (which should totally be better than Chocolate Rain). I turned the 360 on and popped the disc in. The console made a whirring noise for a second and that was it, just sat their displaying the Xbox 360 menu. I hopped over to the game blade and down to the place where it should say "Play Game". No dice. It just had an option to open the DVD tray. I tried a different game. I tried a DVD, No luck.

Then I hopped onto the Xbox 360 forums and discovered I had just become a member of the broken DVD playerRed Ring and one dead because of a bad DVD player. Microsoft really needs to get their shit together. As I pointed out to Peter Moore back when they announced the new warranty club. So that's eight dead because of a for the 360, warranty or no, customers are still going to be annoyed if their new or relatively new consoles keep dying. It's an inconvenience and certainly shakes confidence.

How many Xbox's do people need to go through?  See this is the main problem.  No matter whether they have a 3 year warranty or not, people are entitled to a working machine.  It surely won't be long before there is a major recall of 360's seeing as the new "supposedly fixed" models are only just starting to appear and there is probably still at least 2m dodgy units in circulation along the fact that they will have to cover 360's for the next 3 years...this problem could grow wings and whatever else.  MS have officially stated that there may be problems with up to 10% of the 360's produced whereas other reports seem to think that the motherboard is inherently screwed in the existing model (inclusive of the Elite model), so they could be covering repairs until the middle of 2010.

We also have to consider that the 360 could be well and truely out of the race by then....they could easily be in 3rd position and MS could be preparing to bring out the 720 or whatever they want to call it...yet they are linked with having to repair and replace 360's until the middle of 2010.

I can see big problems on the horizon for MS.