I've now had 17 different BRANDS of scopes fail in one way or another in my rifles. That's not individual scopes, but brands--and some of the brands have failed up to 4 times. Of those failed scopes, the vast majority have been variables--and the few fixed-powers that failed usually had taken far more abuse than the variables.
As an example, one had been mounted on multiple rifles of at least .338 Winchester Magnum recoil on up to .40-caliber African cartridges, often for hundreds of rounds. Eventually the wire reticle broke--but not enough to cause the scope to go out of zero.
To be fair, I often TRY to break scopes, by putting them on harder-kicking rifles and seeing how long they last. Quite a few don't make it through 2-3 boxes of ammunition--but so far only one of those was a fixed-power. Some variables didn't even last a box.
Some of the failed variables have been relatively inexpensive scopes, but quite a few have retailed for $800 and up. Some have been in the mid-price range, say $500 to $800. Off the top of my head I can recall two mid-priced variables that didn't last 200 rounds, and the "biggest" rifles they were mounted on were in the .243 Winchester/.25-06 Remington recoil range.
Have also seen multiple variables belonging to my hunting companions fail over the years, often in the middle of an expensive hunt somewhere. It's even happened to me a couple of times, but I came prepared with a spare fixed-power scope, already sighted-in in appropriate rings. My friends did not, because they believed the "quality" variables on their rifles were unbreakable. One of them ended up borrowing my spare rifle on the hunt.
Now, I do have variables on many of my lighter-recoiling rifles, mostly varmint rifles--but once in a while a variable even quits on a rifle chambered in .204 Ruger or .223 Remington. Shooting light-recoiling rifles thousands of times can be just as hard on a scope as a few dozen shots on a light .300 Winchester Magnum. But usually when shooting a BUNCH, at varmints like prairie dogs, I have several rifles along anyway.
The toughest variables available these days, in fact in my experience the only ones to consistently last PERHAPS as long as fixed powers, are the reinforced, heavy-duty scopes often called "tactical." But even then I don't trust them as much as fixed scopes of the same type, again due to having some heavy-duty variables fail, sometimes after relatively few shots on something like a .338 Lapua.
If somebody else is convinced that modern variables are as tough as fixed powers, I'm happy for them. But that is not my experience, and is the big reason so many of my rifles have fixed powers.
