It's not broken, it's just angry

In the aftermath of Microsoft’s red ring of death blunder, there’s more than a little anxiety surrounding the build quality of the impending PlayStation 4. Unfortunately, it’s an inevitability that electronics will fail, and following reports of broken consoles overnight, Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida has hopped onto Twitter to inform followers that, while the issues are unlikely to be widespread, the platform holder’s looking into the problems all the same.

“Be assured that we are investigating reported PS4 issues,” he wrote, hopefully in a calm and collected manner. “The number is very small compared to [the number of] shipped [units], and we believe that they are isolated incidents.” The executive’s got a point – if the platform holder sells around a million consoles in North America tonight, then even if the fail rate’s less than one per cent, it will still become a big story. Until we start seeing widespread issues across a sizeable number of systems, though, it’s really not worth panicking about just yet.

Still, it’s nice to know that the manufacturer’s keeping a close eye on the reports. We’re sure that this story will continue to run over the coming weeks, but hopefully it fizzles out over time. While previous PlayStation platforms haven’t been flawless from a hardware perspective – the original PS2’s accident-prone laser being a big issue last generation – the reliability of Sony’s products tends to be pretty high. Nevertheless, it’s always worth crossing your fingers during this scary pre-launch period. Let’s do it together, huh?

[source twitter.com, via eurogamer.net]