Well the good news is that Sony sold over 1 million PS4 consoles in just over 24 hours. The bad news is not all of those consoles work. A very vocal minority of early PS4 adopters are affectionately referring to a system crippling issue as “the blue light of death” and there seems to be no fix in sight.
According to Steven Totilo at Kotaku, there has been no official statement from Sony regarding the issue aside from a set of troubleshooting tips posted in the Playstation support forum. That is not stopping folks from airing their grievances wherever they can, like Amazon and Twitter.
As you can see in the video, the system just never really seems to start up if it is having the issue. The pulsing blue light just sits there slowly mocking you for early adoption, never allowing you to enter a game.
Is it as bad as the dreaded “red ring of death” that plagued Microsoft in 2007? I personally don’t feel that way given the smaller number of occurrences and the ticking time bomb that was the “red ring.” It was not fun knowing your console could break at any moment and being powerless to stop it, much like the fragile nature of life. Still, I don’t think we will see people strapping C4 to their broken Playstation anytime soon.
I would call this more of an unfortunate hiccup for Sony, especially considering the record breaking sales they’ve experienced so far. From The Verge:
The PlayStation 4 is now Sony’s fastest-selling console, with North American sales surpassing the initial demand for the PlayStation 2 in Japan. European sales of the PS4 start in just under two weeks, so it’s entirely possible that Sony’s next-gen console could overtake Nintendo’s struggling Wii U sales (currently 3.91 million) by the end of the year.
Couple this with Sony’s PR surge following Microsoft’s early woes at E3 and you have to give the PS4 the edge so far in this new console war with the Xbox One launching on November 22. Either way, there’s going to be a lot of money changing hands this holiday season and the “winners” and “losers” will both be swimming in cash as the dump trucks unload it into their cartoonish vaults.
The only true victors in the new console generation so far is people who love to watch porn on their consoles. Destructoid points out that PornHub has pledged to fully support the PS4 going forward.
According to this probably NSFW tweet (the object in her mouth is hard to make out), Pornhub is the first porn site to fully support the PS4. This is the kind of 3rd party console support that matters in 2013.
PornHub is already fully compatible with the Wii U, which is kind of troubling to say the least, and should work on Xbox support as well if all follows suit. So rejoice deviants, you don’t have to leave the couch and find your computer satiate you carnal desires.
Via gettyimages / VR Zone