PS4 Battery Time-Keeping Time-Bomb Silently Patched By Sony; PS3 Consoles Still Waiting
Furnished content.
Over the past several months, there have been a couple of stories that certainly had owners of Sony PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 consoles completely wigging out. First came Sony's announcement that it was going to shut down support for the PlayStation Store and PlayStation Network on those two consoles. This briefly freaked everyone out, the thinking being that digitally purchased games would be disappeared. Sony confirmed that wouldn't be the case, but there was still the question of game and art preservation, given that no new purchases would be allowed and that in-game purchases and DLC wouldn't be spared for those who bought them. As a result of the outcry, Sony reversed course for both consoles specifically for access to the PlayStation Store, nullifying the debate. Except that immediately afterward came word of an issue with the PS3 and PS4 console batteries and the way they check in with the PlayStation Network (PSN) to allow users to play digital or physical game media. With the PSN still sunsetting on those consoles, the batteries wouldn't be able to check in, and would essentially render the console and all the games users had worthless and unplayable.But now that too has been corrected by Sony, albeit in a completely unannounced fashion.
PlayStation owners wanting to preserve their PS4 libraries well into the future can breathe a sigh of relief, as the system's latest firmware update reportedly fixes a time bomb found inside every console.While Sony's official patch notes for the 9.00 update strangely make no mention of the CMOS fix, that lack of mention may point to a change in its attitude about PlayStation's legacy platforms. With PS5's backward-compatibility limited (so far) to PS4 titles and in the absence of a major overhaul to its PS Now streaming library of games, taking the step to push an update that nixes the CMOS issue on PS3 as well would be a welcome shift.So now PS4 owners are off the hook, though whether they know it or not appears to be a matter of whether they read the news about this on sites like this. PS3 owners, meanwhile, don't currently have a fix in place. And that really does highlight a continuing messaging and transparency problem when it comes to Sony and how it treats its PlayStation customers.Sony has, far too often, had to either reverse course on its plans when its own fans go apeshit, such as when it finally enabled cross-console play for PlayStation games, or instead has had to weather tough public relations and legal storms when it kept to its plans, such as when it removed useful features from the PS3 via firmware update after the public had already bought the console.It's great that the company fixed this problem for the PS4 owners, but what about everyone else? Why not let people know the fix has been made? Why can't this company communicate?
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