XSX and PS5 technical woes: Were they rushed to market?
New Xbox Series and PlayStation 5 consoles are running into numerous technical problems, and early adopters are none to happy.
Owners of Sony’s 9th generation beast are reporting bugs that cause the system crash and soft-brick. Several reviewers have managed to replicate the issue. Demitris from Modern Vintage Gamer encountered it while playing Call of Duty: Cold War. The incident occurred when a “download complete” notification popped up on his screen. Once he rebooted, his console then went into its database recovery, suggesting file system corruption. The problem isn’t just being limited to one game either. Jeff Gerstmann of Giant Bomb encountered the same issue while attempting to put his PS5 into rest mode while playing Spider-Man remastered.
T3 is also reporting sudden and unexplained performance drops in several games.
The launch woes haven’t just been limited to bugs either. The PS5 has limited internal storage. While it does have an M.2 expansion slot, Sony has not officially approved any third party drives for it. In fact, the slot has been disabled entirely in the system’s firmware. So even if you do have an SSD that meets spec, the system will refuse to acknowledge it. While PS4 games can be loaded onto an external USB drive, that is not the case for PS5 games.
Sony has not officially commented on any of these issues, instead asking frustrated fans to send them a DM on Twitter should they have a problem with their new PlayStation.
Meanwhile, things aren’t much rosier over on Team Xbox. Some users have reported that the Blu-ray drive in the Series X is excessively loud or making a strange clicking sound. Others have encountered connectivity issues with the controller.
Perhaps most alarming though are unexplained shutdowns. In a lengthy thread in Microsoft’s official support forums, numerous users are reporting their consoles are suddenly shutting down, then refusing to boot back up.
“The series X worked for maybe 6 hours. I played AC Valhalla for maybe 2 hours and during a cutscene the Xbox shut off and I can’t turn it on. No light nothing. No temperature problem the xbox was very cool,” said one user going by the name StudiedAlex.
Though it is worth noting that this issue doesn’t seem to be as widespread as the others, it still stirs up bad memories of the RRoD and YLoD issues with the Xbox 360 and PS3.
I think it’s fair to say the launch of the 9th generation of consoles has not gone as well as neither Sony nor Microsoft would have liked. However, you can’t say that nobody saw this coming. Back in August, I predicted the launch would have major supply issues, and later suggested that people avoid pre-ordering due to the inevitable bugs launch systems have. Not to toot my own horn, but this is pretty much exactly how things have played out. It’s becoming more and more apparent that perhaps these consoles were rushed to market before they were ready.
2020 has been a bad year, which is perhaps the biggest understatement of the last decade. Supply issues have dogged nearly every major electronics manufacturer. None have been able to get nearly enough units to stores in order to satiate demand. Console launches always have a rush, but this is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my three decades of gaming. It’s the Wii all over again, but on a much grander scale.
Both companies have investor expectations to meet. However, due to the CCPVirus, development teams have been forced to work from home. Numerous games have been delayed, including Microsoft’s big launch exclusive Halo: Infinite. The whole pre-order system was completely botched, letting unscrupulous scalpers have a field day. Now we’re dealing with some pretty serious software bugs on both platforms. Simply put, neither the PS5 nor Xbox Series were ready for prime time. They needed a little longer in the oven. They probably should have been delayed to 2021. But both companies decided to take a gamble, and now a lot of fans are rightfully angry with how the whole rollout has been handled.
