Game Guy doesn’t know anyone who still plays their original Xbox 360.

That includes Game Guy, who’s hoping his Xbox 360 Elite lasts through Thanksgiving, when he’ll start begging Santa for yet another one. (In GG’s case, No. 4.)

So it surprised him to hear of a new report by warranty writer SquareTrade that puts the Xbox 360 failure rate at 16.4 percent, instead of the 30 percent or so estimated by others, including an unnamed source who supposedly worked on the systems.

By comparison, Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii suffer from failure rates of around 3 percent, the company found.

SquareTrade bases its Xbox 360 finding on a random sample of 1,000 warranties written. Of those, 164 systems failed.

About 60 percent of those failures are heralded by the “red ring of death,” SquareTrade says. That’s when the four LEDs in a circle on the front show red instead of green. The reason most often cited for this is overheating, which causes the motherboard to warp and circuits to dislodge.

Xbox 360 maker Microsoft Corp. insists the system failure rates are closer to those of competing systems, but has expanded the warranty program for Xbox 360s anyway.

Game Guy’s inclined to think SquareTrade’s estimate understates the problem. After all, if everyone he knows has traded in broken systems — and that’s quite a few people — and he himself is on system No. 3 … well, then that’s closer to a 100 percent failure rate and a lot of prayers uttered within that small group that their newest Xbox 360s will last a little while.

It’s really no fun for Game Guy to test new titles as they come out but at the same time hope his Xbox 360 survives to play another day. Maybe someday soon, Microsoft will realize that, too.