Could it be that PS3 is Already Ahead of Xbox 360?
While PS3 has been continually outselling Microsoft's Xbox 360 worldwide ever since the price-reduced slim model of PS3 was released in September 2009, so far supposedly 39 Million Xbox 360s have been sold to consumers around the world, versus 34 Million PS3s. But is the userbase of Microsoft's Xbox 360 really larger than that of PS3 or could PS3 possibly be ahead already? There is much evidence in favor of this assumption.
As we know, Microsoft was forced to extend the warranty of Xbox 360 to three years to compensate for the extremely high failure rate, which a recent survey found to be at 42% total. Unfortunately, the survey does not differentiate between early (2005-2008) and later models of Xbox 360, which are apparently much more durable.
So far there have been five major revisions of the 360's hardware. The dreaded "Red Ring of Death" (RRoD) mostly occured in models made before late 2008: Xenon (2005-2006), Zephyr (2006-2007), Opus (2007) and Falcon (2007-2008), with each subsequent revision having lower failure rates. The worst failure rate occured in the first revision (Xenon); quite possibly above 66%. Jasper was introduced in late 2008 / early 2009, and anecdotal evidence points to it having a much more reasonable failure rate; probably well below 10%.
Xenon is now out of warranty: In late 2008, the 3-year warranty ended for those 360s sold in 2005/2006. Most of these did faill at least once during the three year period, and more than half of those that failed, failed more than once. The reason for is is that Microsoft didn't exchange defective Xenons with Falcons or Jaspers but with fixed Xenons. It is therefore safe to assume that many have failed again since the warranty ran out. In 2010, warranty runs out for the Zephyr & Opus revisions.
To sum it up, from November 2005 until late 2007, rougly 15.8 Million Xbox 360s were sold, which comprise the hardware revisions with the worst failure rates (Xenon, Zephyr, Opus). To make things simple, let's assume 60% of them died (or are eventually going to die) out of warranty = 9.4 Million. It's a given that most people who built up a library of games and play games online with their friends won't simply abandon 360 alltogether just because their out of warranty console fails; they will buy a replacement.
For simplicity's sake, let's assume 3/4 buy a new one, which equals roughly 7 Million. Now, if we substract this number from the total number of Xbox 360s sold, we arrive at 32 Million. If we only count active 360s, we also have to substract those 2.4 Million failed 360s that were not replaced. And this is probably it, the real install base of Xbox 360: 29.6 Million.
PS3 on the other hand reportedly has a failure rate of 8%; let's assume that 2/3 of the defects occured outside of Sony's 1-year warranty (=5.28%, or 1.79 Million), and that 3/4s of those who encountered a defect eventually bought a new PS3 (=1.34 Million), then we arrive at an install base of 32.21 Million.
Since we don't have precise numbers regarding failure rates, the above figures should be taken with a grain of salt.
However, the conclusion is simple: As of 2010, PS3 most likely has a larger install base than Xbox 360.
"Well certainly with the Xbox 360, we had some challenges at the launch. Once we identified that we took control of it. We wanted to do it right by our customers. Our customers are very important to us." -Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb (10/2013). Note: RRoD was fixed with the Jasper-revision 3 years after the launch of 360
"People don't pay attention to a lot of the details."-Yusuf Mehdi explaining why Xbone DRM scheme would succeed
"Fortunately we have a product for people who aren't able to get some form of connectivity; it's called Xbox 360,”-Don Mattrick
"The region locking of the 3DS wasn't done for profits on games"-MDMAlliance
