The unthinkable has happened for unsuspecting YouTuber ACG, as his PlayStation 5 review unit has unexpectedly broken completely due to a bizarre storage glitch, leaving only a heavy, white-and-black brick where a next-gen gaming machine once existed. With launch day bringing the first consumer shipments of Sony consoles to players' doors in select November 12 launch countries, this is every early PS5 adopter's worst nightmare come true, and it could be a very ill omen.
Despite being the hottest (hopefully not literally) item of the Holiday 2020 season, the lead-up to PS5's first launch wave tomorrow has not been a completely smooth one. A notorious next-gen pre-launch fiasco amid the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of stunted supply lines, shortages, and customers' inability to pick up a new console in-stores on day one for the first time in recent gaming history. At high-profile PS5 game announcement events, Sony made promises it couldn't keep or never meant to make in the first place, and a small (but dedicated) uproar has most recently grown audible after the console manufacturer confirmed that the PS5 won't support 1440p resolutions. However, all of that pales in comparison to players' now-realized fears of completely nonfunctional $500 gaming machines ruining their launch experiences.
Popular YouTube game reviewer ACG reports that his PS5 was "100% dead" as of yesterday, citing "storage rebuild issues" that other PS5 reviewers - who have been playing on the same console build players will receive tomorrow - have also corroborated. While this seems to have been an especially disastrous case of the storage rebuild glitch and ACG reports that Sony has been a help "working through troubleshooting" with him, this is the first credible report of a PS5 completely bricking itself, and it comes before the console has even officially released.
Other reviewers, such as GiantBomb's Jeff Gerstmann, have corroborated PS5's storage building glitch, but ACG's case is the first total console-bricking documented as a result of this apparent software and hardware weakness. Gerstmann says that similar issues have cropped up for him when "putting [his] PS5 into rest mode while Spider-Man Remastered is running," prompting a system message that reads "repair your external drive" upon subsequent startup, at which point his console "boots normally." That final step may be where his and ACG's experiences diverged, and it begs the question of what caused the latter console's complete death spiral.
Although the PS5's proprietary SSD has been vaulted as a lightning-fast beacon for what next-gen gaming is capable of, it's not been free of recent controversy. Primarily, prospective buyers and pre-order holders have felt jilted by the 885GB SSD actually only providing 667GB of usable space, whereas the Xbox Series X provides over 800GB of free space.
However, that small and common complaint for new console storage pales in comparison to this latest revelation. Coupled with faulty Xbox Series console family reports that have begun to roll in since yesterday's launch, it puts the potentially disastrous hardware and software consequences of COVID-19's impact on the ninth console generation into perspective.
The PlayStation 5 will be available in select countries on November 12, 2020 and globally on November 19.
Source: ACG