Real story of Xbox 360 RRODs outed

ALL THREE CONSOLE companies have been touting their respective sales figures, after the year's NPD data was released.

Gamasutra reports that Wii consoles were second in terms of unit sales, selling almost 6.3 million in 2007, with more than 2.3 million of those sold in November and December. Since their respective launches, Nintendo has sold more than 17.6 million Nintendo DS systems and close to 7.4 million Wii systems in the U.S.

Xbox 360 sold 1.3 million consoles in December, and PlayStation 3 sold 798,000. Nonetheless, between the Wii and DS, Nintendo accounted for 52 percent of all video game hardware systems sold in the year. Nintendo claims responsibility for 60 percent of the 43 percent industry growth over 2006.

Wii/DS
In a new release, Nintendo has touted a 'broad software lineup' for the first half of the new year with some 65 Wii titles and 85 for the DS. The release schedule for the US can be seen here.

Wii Fit sat top of the latest Japanese software chart in a quiet week for sales as the year closed.

The success of Wii Fit is good news for the North American launch, which has been announced as occurring in the second quarter of this year. Lets hope they've reinforced the unit for our large cousins in our eastern colony.

If there was ever a great Wii headline this is it. Tech Digest reports "Man invented the Nintendo Wii eight years ago, in his underpants, using a Dreamcast ". More here.

Engadget thinks we might be in store for new Wii colours, due to a leaked Target stock receipt.

Here's the usual Eurogamer Wii Virtual Console round-up.

Xbox 360
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a very interesting interview with someone close to the RROD failures that the Xbox 360 has suffered since its earliest incarnation.

On failure rates the source states: "It's around 30p er cent, and all will probably fail early. This quarter they are expecting a million failures, most of those Xenons. Some of those are repeat failures. Life expectancy is all over the map because the design has very little margin for most of the important parameters." Xenon was the code-name for the first motherboard design used in the system.

Regarding quality assurance, the insider doesn't fill us with any more confidence. "MS has under resourced that product unit in all engineering areas since the very beginning. Especially in engineering support functions like test, quality, manufacturing, and supplier management." It continues: "MS was so focused on beating Sony this cycle that the 360 was rushed to market when all indications were that it had serious flaws. The design qual testing was insufficient and incomplete when the product was released to production."

The source also spoke about the newer designs, giving more cause for concern: "I've heard that the failure rates for the current design is sub 10 per cent. Much much better, but still too high."

He also gave an interesting tip-bit regarding the next hardware refresh: " The 360 roadmap always called for SI die shrink and integration, since that's where most of the cost is. Right now they are working to get the GPU and CPU on the same BGA package for the next mobo."

The free game announced as compensation for Xbox Live outages, has been declared as 'Undertow'. We were hoping that we might have a choice.

If you're simply fed-up with the under-performing Xbox Live service, maybe you should try the SeXbox. Or maybe not. µ