On Xbox 360 failure rates

James Robertson has brought up a topic of consoles again. While I totally agree that reported failure rates are absolutely unacceptable and point to a problem in either hardware design or shoddy assembly, the other important side of the story that often gets overlooked is how Microsoft deals with these failures when they do occur. To be honest, I was a little concerned about the perceived failures when I bought my own Xbox 360 for Christmas, and those concerns grew into uneasy anticipation when I started seeing intermittent error messages during bootup before network adapter died completely. I pretty much expected the repair process to cost me a couple hundred dollars and countless hours spent on the phone, but actually that couldn’t be further from the truth. Here’s how the process worked (in my case, other’s may differ, but the chatter in blogosphere indicates similar experiences),

1. Call 1-800-4MY-XBOX
2. Hold for less than 5 minutes
3. Provide your name, address and console’s serial number
4. Describe the problem
   1. It’s worth mentioning that they will try to troubleshoot problems that don’t report error codes back, but as long as you have a Red Ring of Death they won’t bother you with meaningless “let’s unplug the hard drive and try again” scenarios, which is a relief
5. Confirm your name and address
6. They will ship the empty cardboard box with packaging material immediately via Purolator
7. Once the cardboard box arrives (about 5 days later), take your concole (just the console itself, no hard drive, controllers or power supply), tape the box up and stick the included return label on top of the original shipping label (remember to tear and keep the small tab with tracking numbers from the return label)
8. Take the package to closest Purolator outlet (one was right in the building next to my office)
9. Drop off the package, no paperwork required, you don’t even need to wait in line in most cases, just make sure you hand off the box to someone who looks like customer service
10. About 10 days later another box will arrive via Purolator, this time with a repaired (or refurbished or brand new) console and that’s it, you’re back at it spending countless hours trying to get those pesky multiplayer Gears of War achievements
11. Also included in a box you will find a free 1-month Xbox Live Gold subscription, which works well for those who are already subscribed so they don’t feel ripped off by not having a console for about 3 weeks, but it also works well for those who are Silver subscribers as a bonus type thing to go and play online for a while, a win-win thing IMHO

So, all in all, about a 10 minute phone call and less than 3 weeks waiting was all it took, and I’m mighty pleased with how professionally it was handled. Suddenly, I don’t feel as bad and that’s one heck of an important lesson other companies could learn from Microsoft right about now.

Update: I bet these failures have something to do with Decepticons…

Holy, Trailer…

If you’d asked me what was the least likely thing to be posted here, I would have said game trailers. Until today that is. I’d came across a trailer for Gears of War while watching last night’s episode of War at Home on Fox and its not the graphics or game itself per se that impressed me, but rather the way this trailer was built to evoke emotional response via the unusual (for the genre) use of a soundtrack and overall composition not specifically focused on shooting and blowing things up. Very impressive, indeed, especially in 1080i.

Update: Some had asked if I knew the origin of the soundtrack, from Major Nelson’s blog, ” [...] The music used is disc 1, cut 13 from the ‘Donnie Darko’ soundtrack [...]“

Update: And, yes, CliffyB is quite a character.