Every console has its fair share of issues. Most of these, thankfully, are fixed easily enough. Unfortunately, experts are now warning of an almost-inevitable PlayStation 4 error code that can one day strike your console and render it completely and utterly useless, wiping all your games in the process.
Earlier this month, the video game preservation Twitter account Does it play? mentioned the ominous-sounding Error CE 34878-0 for the PlayStation 4. In short, this is an issue that can occur when the console's internal internal clock battery kicks the bucket. They claim that once the battery dies, and it eventually will, every digital file on the PlayStation 4 becomes useless without reconnecting to the server.
Dataminer Lance McDonald also chimed in to explain that this mass data loss is tied to PlayStation Trophies. He noted that Trophies on PS4 need the internal system clock to be correct, so that you cant change the date to make it look like you bagged a certain Trophy earlier than you did. "If your PS4 clock battery dies, all your games die," he finished.
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Obviously this is fairly alarming to hear. The battery can of course be replaced, but you'd still need to connect to the server at some point to get your wiped games back. Given the news earlier this week that Sony intends to shut down the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, and PlayStation Portable storefronts for good in the next few months, there is a possible future in which the PlayStation Network is shut down and you're blocked from accessing your PlayStation 4 games forever. It might not be likely at this stage, as McDonald himself pointed out, but it's not completely impossible either.
"Just to emphasise: you can fix this by just putting a new battery in then syncing your console to the PSN once," McDonald added. "We are just pointing out that the console will be bricked in some imaginary distant future when the PSN goes away (if ever?)."
In short, don't worry about your PS4 collection suddenly becoming worthless overnight. Even so, it's troubling to think that such a future is even slightly possible. The good news is that any such disaster is realistically years and years away, which we'd hope would give Sony plenty of time to figure out how to properly preserve our video games. We'd hope.
Topics: GAMING, News, PlayStation 4
