If it hadn't been for the thousands of gamers worldwide (if not tens of thousands) who experienced malfunctions occurring with the Xbox 360 and its games and patches, today's news would have sounded like something out of the science fiction genre. As everyone knows, the Xbox 360 is a very, very faulty machine and the list of broken or malfunctioning units keeps growing. This week, Daily Tech is reporting that according to retailers, the 360 may be suffering a failure rate as high as one in three, as I found out via Evil Avatar.

During EB Games' conference calls for its Canadian stores, a new policy was revealed concerning the super-high failure rates of the Xbox 360. "The real numbers were between 30 to 33 percent," said former EB Games employee Matthieu G., also adding that at launch time, it was even a bigger issue. "We had 35 Xbox 360s at launch I know more than half of them broke within the first six months (red lights or making circles under the game discs). Two of them were dead on arrival."

Other retailers reported almost the same figures when speaking of failing Xbox 360s. For example, as I found via the same reporting sites, an anonymous Best Buy customer service department manager, stated that failure rates for the console were "between a quarter to a third" of all units sold.

"We see a ton of [Xbox 360s] come back all the time. We strongly push our customers to buy our service plans no matter what they buy, but it is especially important for them with the Xbox 360," said the manager. "It's a lucky thing for us that Microsoft extended the factory warranty to one year, because we were having a hell of a time dealing with the launch units. Now we don't have to deal with those broken [Xbox 360s] until their second year, for those who have purchased the two year plans."

So, as every week goes by, more reports of malfunctioning 360s arise. All Microsoft can hope for now is that their Xbox 360 Elite works better. And, you know, they rolled it out long after all the reports of bad 360s.