Local gamers are sending in their Xbox 360 video game consoles by the dozens as Microsoft fixes glitches with the technology.

Any Xbox 360 owner who experiences a general hardware failure – indicated by three flashing red lights – will now be covered by a three-year warranty from date of purchase, according to Microsoft; previously, the warranty for general hardware failure was only for a year.

Marshall and Sonya Gray, owners of the UPS Store at 760 Campbell Lane, say they are shipping about 30 to 35 Xbox consoles each week from gamers sending them back for repairs. And dropoffs have increased steadily within the last few months, Sonya Gray said, with as many as 12 Xbox consoles being dropped off in one day alone – she recalled one customer who was sending his Xbox back for the sixth time.

&#8220It’s a hot item and the bugs aren’t completely worked out of it,” Sonya Gray said.

As a matter of policy, Microsoft won’t disclose specific return or failure rates. Local gamers, however, who are paying a retail price of below or above $300 for the console, have come to their own conclusions.

Titus Phillips, assistant manager of GameStop in Greenwood Mall, said failure rates are reportedly at 45 percent for the Xbox consoles released in 2005 and 35 percent for those released later.

&#8220People are upset, but they’re not upset at us because there’s nothing we can do about it,” he said.

Stephen Skaggs, a 10th-grade gamer from Edmonson County who sent his Xbox back once, said he got his console back in two weeks and hasn’t had any problems since. He also said some of his friends had experienced the &#8220three rings of death” and had to send in their consoles to be repaired.

Matt Greene, a salesperson at The Great Escape on Scottsville Road, said consumers are looking past the technical issues.

&#8220All new consoles have a few problems when they first come out,” Greene said.

Yet, of the 30 or so Xbox game systems that Great Escape customers have tried to get the store to purchase, only about 10 of them were functional.

&#8220I’ve had several friends that haven’t had any problems with theirs; I guess it’s just the luck of the draw,” Greene said.

For the Gamers’ Guild at Western Kentucky University, the problems with the Xbox have resulted in lower consumer confidence in the console.

&#8220Xbox has always had problems,” former Gamers’ Guild president Samuel McGhee said. &#8220There are members of our club, who are mostly college students and thus poor, who buy more reliable systems such as the Wii or the PS2.”

In the U.S. alone, customer spending on Xbox 360 is 2:1 to that of Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii, with Xbox 360 consumers spending more than 2.7 billion in revenue since November 2006 on hardware, software and accessories combined, versus $1.3 billion on PS3 and $1.7 billion on Wii, according to July figures from NPD market research.

The Xbox 360 has an estimated retail price of $349.99 for its &#8220Pro” system, which includes a 20 gigabyte hard drive, wireless controller, Xbox 360 headset and other features. The Xbox 360 Core System, which comes with less gadgets, retails for $279.99; while the more powerful Xbox Elite retails for $449.99.