You can add Seth Jayson of The Motley Fool to the list of people who’ve experienced the dreaded three rings of death on their Xbox 360. He loves the games, but the 360 hardware? Having experienced the death of two boxes himself, he regrettably calls it Microsoft’s Xbotch.

Microsoft has been rather quiet on the issue, putting the failure rates down to isolated incidents. This is where Jayson makes a good point:

In effect, it doesn’t matter if the rate of Xbotch failure is as low as Microsoft reportedly contends, because the perceived rate of failure is what matters to consumers. People trust what they hear. And if they hear enough from irate Xbotch or Zune customers, they aren’t going to open up the wallet.

The perceived rate of failure is indeed high. Nearly every video game centric forum on the net has reports of people getting the three red rings of death. Microsoft needs to wise up and get these problems fixed. The 360 is a fine piece of hardware, but the fact that so many people are experiencing issues is a shame.

Microsoft’s Xbotch [Motley Fool]

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