My friend Mike brought his Wii over for our party yesterday, and he brought along the new Tiger Woods golf game - which is amazingly good. It's also hilarious - as you play, the announcers get very snarky about your game. Anyway, that success is contrasted by this Wikipedia article that Andres pointed out to me - apparently, Sony isn't the only console vendor with a few issues:

In the early months after the console launch Microsoft claimed in the press that failure rate was in industry average 3-5%. However, the company have not released any official statistics on the failure rate of the console since its launch, and the company's policy is not to do so, instead focusing on a prompt solution of any technical problems arising. Despite Microsoft's reticence, some retailers have reported abnormally high failure rates, with one ex-employee of a retailer estimating the rate to be between 30-33%. FOX News reported 2.5 million consoles broken in the world.

You can follow the link for the citations - there are links to various sources in the original text I've quoted here. I haven't heard about these issues cropping up with the Wii, but Nintendo also didn't reach very far into the "bleeding edge" for their technology.

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