In an article appearing on videogame industry website MCV, director of South African distributor Apex Interactive, Quinton Davie (referred to as Quinton Eavie in the article), has said that many of South Africa’s major retailers have refused to stock Microsoft’s Xbox 360 due to concerns over the console’s reliability.

Tied directly to fears over the Xbox 360’s reported failure rate, resulting in the infamous Red Ring of Death (RROD) that many an Xbox owner has experienced, retailers in the country won’t replenish stock of the console.

According to Davie:

“The Xbox360 has had a rather rough time in South Africa. It has been plagued with an extraordinarily high failure rate on the hardware when it was initially launched, which has seen it been removed from some of the important retail stores in our territory.”

Despite Xbox 360 hardware revisions in the last year that have dramatically improved reliability, Microsoft’s extended warranty programme, and a dedicated distributor for the console in the country, South African retailers still feel consumers are wary of purchasing a machine that may require further investments of time and money to keep it running in the long (and even short) term.

Davie also commented on sales performance of the Xbox 360’s current South African market rivals, the PS2 and the Wii:

“South Africa still has strong sales on the PS2 console, even though it is not strong in Europe. PS2 was still one of the highest volume movers for last Christmas.

“Wii is also performing well in South Africa. DS has had a much slower up take in the marketplace – so much so that Nintendo released the DS Lite, skipped over the DSi and then launched the DSi XL at the end of last month.”

Source: MCV