Don’t panic. A few early reports, from a few lucky console owners do not necessarily make for a widespread problem. This might develop into nothing serious but the number of units struck with this issue, in ratio to the number of units that are actually out in the wild, makes this worth reporting – even at this early stage.
Some of the PlayStation 4 consoles, delivered to outlets like Kotaku and IGN, have already broken. Stephen Totilo of Kotaku writes “the first retail unit that Sony provided me failed to work when I plugged it into a TV in Kotaku’s office.” Upon further investigation, he and a colleague diagnosed the problem by comparing with another console they had which worked and deduced that “the bad unit had a faulty HDMI jack that we couldn’t fully plug an HDMI cable into.”
A couple of the winners of Taco Bell’s promotion that were lucky enough to receive PS4 consoles before the official North American release have also reported what sounds like a very similar issue. One user on Reddit has offered a little bit more detail. His console turned on but the pulsing blue light on the front, which turns white when the system boots, simply continued to pulse blue. There was no output on his TV.
IGN has posited the idea that this might have been related to the firmware update 1.50 after one of their machines worked before the update and not after it. With other users reporting dead consoles straight out of the box, that possibility seems unlikely.
It sounds more likely that this is an issue caused by a bad connection to the HDMI port on the PS4’s motherboard which causes the HDMI socket itself to move while in transit – or perhaps not make a proper connection during manufacturing.
We’re sure this is an issue Sony is looking into and would hope to find a resolution to as quickly as possible. We’ll know much more after Friday, when hundreds of thousands of brand new PlayStation 4 consoles are in the eager hands of consumers across North America. Let’s hope it’s an issue with a single batch and doesn’t become a bigger problem that could cause us Europeans – with our later release date – to reconsider those precious pre-orders.
UPDATE: Shuhei Yoshida, President of Sony Worldwide Studios has tweeted the following:
Be assured we are investigating reported PS4 issues. The number is very small compared to shipped, we believe they are isolated incidents.
— Shuhei Yoshida (@yosp) November 14, 2013
CarBoyCam
Read a word of warning on t’internet that Microsoft has contracted some ‘Reputation Management’ people. I’m believing nothing I hear about the PS4 or Xbone now. :P November 29th can arrive and I’m sure everything will be fine. :D
boeboe
I love a good conspiracy! Yeah I’ll buy that. Sounds less ridiculous than the bankers fucking the economy then getting paid their bonuses afterwards. Which happened.
Scythegpd
Sometimes the truth is stranger than a conspiracy though.
Remember the “PS3 burnt down my house” story when that console launched? Hit all the pages, until Sony investigated, turns out he didn’t even own a PS3. Posted a retraction in lieu of court action that, unsurprisingly, got almost no air-time.
Granted that wasn’t MS however some obsessed fans of a console will do anything to damage the “opposition” (yes, this goes both ways)
However if you think MS are “above” guerrilla tactics like that have a look at the Halloween documents and their approach to open source operating systems.
Dominic Leighton
Worrying reading! As someone who’s launch 360, and 360 Elite both red-ringed (and led me to becoming a PS3 owner), I’m sadly all to aware of the issues early consoles have had this last generation. Hopefully this issue stems from a single batch of consoles, and is limited to a small number within that.
Tuffcub
Look at this way, there will be a million or two PS4s shipped out. A couple of them are always going to not work when you ship that number of consoles. I bet the PS1 had a pretty high failure rate, but the interweb didn’t exist then so stupid people could hype what normal, small, problem, in to A MASSIVE OMG FUCK ME SCANDAL.
Things don’t work occasionally, the chances of you getting a dodgy PS4 between miniscule and fuck all.
IF there is a huge number of reports after tonight – and I mean 1000s, not ten – then there is a problem. Anything less than a couple of hundred and it’s just simple manufacturing errors which every single electrical device is prone to.
Bilbo_bobbins
well said, I was just about to write the same thing. It annoys the hell out of me, that just because 4 people on Reddit have said their’s is broken, means that the PS4 has a major problem. Get out of it.
If its just 10 out of hundreds of thousands then that is pretty good failure rate. I means I’ve had to take my new cars back to the garage on a few occasions because it doesn’t work right, I’ve never had a Sony console fail on me so far (touch wood).
yd
I wouldn’t be surprised by 1000s, really.
We don’t know how many there’ll be on Friday, but they were talking of over a million pre-orders? If half of those arrive on Friday, 1000 failures is 0.2%. Which is a very good failure rate. 10000 would be 2%, which is still pretty good.
Buy such a complicated piece of technology, there’s always going to be a risk of it being dead on arrival, or dying shortly after. Anything under 5% isn’t too bad. 10% doesn’t seem to bother some companies I could name either.
I think some people are getting a bit desperate for some bad news for Sony over the past week or 2.
Peter Chapman
well, kinda, yes. BUT. There aren’t millions out in the world. There are a couple of hundred and four or five of them are broken on delivery or within a few days.
That’s significant enough to pause for thought but, as we’ve said, might just be one early batch that fell of a fork lift or something daft.
Tuffcub
Indeed, the interweb can make a mountain out of a dodgy HDMI lead. No need to panic just yet.
yd
Sounds more like there are a few thousand out there already.
But even 4 or 5 out of 200 wouldn’t be that surprising. 2 or 2.5% failures? Nothing unusual there.
And even if it’s not anything serious, or even just a dodgy batch or someone dropped a stack of them, is it anything to worry about yet? If it’s just normal random failures, the first batch people get their hands on could have higher or lower failure rates. It happens. They could sell millions and find a 0.1% failure rate except in 1 town where 20% fail for absolutely no reason.
So far, it looks like anything from a normal failure rate down to a surprisingly low failure rate.
Although anything more than zero would be enough to cause the internet to overreact.
Broonba
Aye exactly mate. I’ll wait to see how this all pans out before possibly reaching for the kleenex. …and no…the kleenex isn’t for what you think…you just have a dirty mind. :p
Stefan L
See? Sony were just letting the US market test the hardware for us, so the EU can get the good stuff all the way…
Right?
cam the man
Very kind of Sony to let the Americans test them before we get it.
Bilbo_bobbins
so hundreds of thousands shipped, and basically a few people having theirs not working. One case on Reddit it was actually the persons fault for restarting the console while it was installing something.
There will always be a certain failure rate and if it was bad I think there would be more of an outcry than so far.
Peter Chapman
nonono, there’s a few hundred in the wild. Not hundreds of thousands just yet. A handful of competition winners, the big US sites and 444 they sold from their hotel in New York, I think.
Bilbo_bobbins
I think there are more than a few hundred. Sorry but Taco Bell have already shipped all of theirs, and I’m sure people are getting them early. I’ve heard of four cases, even if it is 500, that’s a failure rate of about 1% so far.
The Von Braun
Chap at work bought an iPad Mini the other week from Argos (other stores avaiable :-) ) took it straight from store into work, opened it, could’nt get the Wi-Fi to connect.He tried swearing at it, then asked a few us to look at it, more swearing, then we concluded that it probably was f**ked, so he took it back and swapped it for another, which did work.
Moral of the story:Just because it’s:new, expensive and been bought just to try and make your mates jealous, does’nt mean damn thing will work straight out the box, espically if your talking consumer electronics…
Besides, those PS4’s might be Friday afternoon/Monday morning models…..as ex-engineer myself, trust me, you want to avoid anything put together during those periods.
Still, how long before internet snowball’s this into something way out of proportion? any of the ‘gutter press’ got hold of the story yet?
:-)
bigchrissyc
Hopefully its only isolated. Lets be fair nothing can be as shocking as the 360 launch and even continuation of sub-par hardware.
blarty
I believe around about 3% is the tolerance level of hardware manufacturing faults before there can be attributed a serious issue worthy of a recall or official stance regarding batches etc (unless of course, the incidence level can be traced to a specific batch or batches, which would then try to preempt other items in that batch failing)
If both consoles sell 2 million over the next 3 weeks the incidence level could be up to 60000 consoles for both XB1 and PS4 failling within that tolerance range…. the key is to see what happens this weekend and next, rather than reach for those internet-enabled torches and pitchforks
Damigos
1 million +preordered, about a million shipped and there how many reports of broken ps4s? 20? 200?
Its NOTHING actually..
bunimomike
Sony has to allow for failures as a certain percentage of the number shipped. If it’s around 1%, it still means 20,000 failures from 2,000,000 PS4s. Those 20,000 potential failures will be extremely vocal online, that’s for sure.
blarty
I think they’ve said that there were 2000 in the Taco Bell promotion that were shipped early, and the units provided to the media at the event would have been taken back to their own offices in over head luggage etc if they’d have been flying. – I believe the idea is it’s about 2500 in the wild, and there’s been, I think, 7 occurences of failure however that only takes into account people au fait with Twitter, Reddit, NeoGAF etc enough to raise the issue publicly
Starman
There may have been a million or so shipped but how many have been in use so far? Only a small amount. That’s why its a big story.
beeje13
8 reports out of 5000 units apparently, although don’t hold me to that.
If so 0.16% defective is very good. Obviously this doesn’t count other problems that come after a period use.
Starman
Sorry I just find it a little amusing how everyone’s desperately defending it with wildly speculative figures, whereas as if this were a few X1’s that were faulty they’d be proclaiming the end of xbox.
beeje13
Not speculative at all really, 4000 early units from Taco Bell promotion and i’m guessing the guy who quoted 5000 added 1000 for good measure, press units etc..
And as for the Xbox One, I’m not sure how many TARGET dispatched early by mistake but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have been thousands by mistake. Not to mention embargos. If there was RROD-like situation for the Xbox One (extremely unlkiely) then I think the ‘end of Xbox’ wouldn’t be too inaccurate….
yd
I love this argument that everyone would be saying something different if it was happening to the other console. Seems to pop up whenever someone tries to make something big out of something that isn’t.
But never works the other way. I bet you’d be trying to defend it if it was MS having the problem. Except it’s quite obviously not a problem (or doesn’t appear to be, yet).
I think most people (if not trying to score points in a console war) would realise that (a) it’s far too early to say if it’s an actual problem, (b) would say that whichever console we were talking about, and (c) would admit it was a problem with either console if it turns out the real failure rate is something significant.
beeje13
@yd +1
Of course if it does turn out that more than 1% PS4’s have the same problem (HDMI port faulty) then it’s poor, you would have thought they had done batch testing which should have flagged this up.
Starman
@Beeje didn’t mean the number you came up with, rather that there’s a whole variety of amounts from the comments here.
@yd compare the comments on the “no 3d bluray on X1” to the ps4’s version. Totally different, even the article is mocking throughout.
OnlineAssassinOA
If there is any problem at least Sony have said there looking into it already,and haven’t ignored everyone for months and had to be threatened with legal action to do anything.
Starman
@OA yeah they’ve learnt from their past mistakes fortunately.