So the PS4 came out last Friday and I've spent most of the weekend either playing it or reading forum threads about other people's units dying, which is a weirdly big chunk of what "owning a PS4 in November 2013" actually means right now.
Quick backstory for anyone who doesn't follow this stuff: Sony launched the PlayStation 4 on November 15th, $399, and by Saturday morning half of NeoGAF and reddit was full of people posting videos of a blue light blinking on their console instead of the usual white "it's on" glow. No picture, no sound, nothing. People are calling it the Blue Light of Death, because gamers never met a hardware failure they didn't want a dramatic acronym for. Sony's official line was that it's affecting less than 1% of units built at launch, but go read those threads and it sure feels like more than 1%, even accounting for the fact that broken stuff gets way louder online than working stuff ever does.
I got lucky. Mine works fine. I did the whole midnight thing at the GameStop by my apartment, which in hindsight was a mistake because it was about 40 degrees out and I stood in a strip mall parking lot for two hours next to a guy who would not stop talking about Killzone: Shadow Fall's frame rate like it was a personal grudge he was carrying. I did not buy Killzone. I bought Battlefield 4, which, side note, has been kind of a mess on every platform this fall between the multiplayer crashes and that whole "levolution" building collapse bug people keep clipping (not really a PS4-specific problem, more of a "DICE shipped this early" problem), but it colors the launch a little.
The console itself, hardware issues aside, is genuinely nice to hold. Way smaller than I expected after years of the PS3's giant black slab thing sitting under my TV like a Xerox machine. The DualShock 4 is a real improvement too — the touchpad is mostly decoration right now since almost nothing uses it yet, but the sticks finally don't feel like they're fighting you, and the light bar looks cool for about the first day before you start resenting it a little for lighting up your dark living room like a tiny nightclub every time you play at 11pm.
What's actually interesting to me isn't the console, it's watching a hardware failure become a story in real time before the company controlling the narrative can get ahead of it. A few years ago you'd hear "some consoles are defective" from word of mouth or maybe a GameFAQs thread and it would take weeks to feel like a real trend. This time it was maybe 18 hours from launch to "the blue light of death" being a phrase with its own shorthand, its own compilation videos, its own guy on Twitter counting how many replies to Sony's PR account mentioned it. Doesn't matter if the failure rate really is under 1%— the story now is the story, and Sony's going to be answering blue light questions through the holidays whether the number is small or not.
One thing nobody warned me about and that I will complain about here because it's my blog and I get to: the PS4's power cable is this weird proprietary-looking two-prong thing instead of a standard kettle cord, and if you're the kind of person who keeps a spare cable in a drawer for exactly this situation, tough, you don't have one. Small thing. Annoyed me anyway.
If you're thinking about buying one this week, my honest advice is to open the box in the store if they'll let you, or at least test it within your return window, because a 1-in-100-ish shot at a dead console is not nothing when the thing costs four hundred bucks and the whole reason you're buying it is to play games at launch, not ship it back and wait for a replacement over the busiest shipping week of the year. Xbox One is out in two days and I'd bet real money we're having some version of this exact conversation again by the weekend, just with a different colored light.