5 ms·

As of right now, there are 323 1-star reviews. Sony sold "81,639" PS3 consoles on that unit's launch day. So if Amazon shipped 81,639 PS4 consoles, this would

As of right now, there are 323 1-star reviews. Sony sold "81,639" PS3 consoles on that unit's launch day. So if Amazon shipped 81,639 PS4 consoles, this would be a failure rate of 4.0 units per 1000, or 0.4%. Microsoft noted at one point during the Xbox 360 launch that the industry standard failure rate was between 3 and 5%. Presuming that same 3-5% is the failure rate for the PS4, and that 100% of DOA customers posted a 1-star comment, Amazon sold between 6,460 and 10,766 PS4 units. I would hope the failure rate is closer to 0.4% than to 4.0%, but I can't even hazard a guess at Amazon's sales volume, so this is where the hard numbers stop. (ps. I didn't check my math closely and I'm walking out the door, feel free to correct me in replies and I'll edit later to reflect.)

spaux 13y ago
I'm more upset by the way they are handling it, it looks like they aren't going to replace them, but try to fix them. Anyone who's sent an RROD xbox (I haven't) knows the pain that will come with that. You'll see your PS4 again in a few weeks.
- Nerdfest 13y ago
  I had the RROD with an XBox and they were _very_ quick getting it back. I think it was a couple of days. It's still an inconvenience, but it was also after more than a year of use. Ctl-Alt-Del is referring to this as the "Pulsing Blue Dick-Punch of Death". I think everyone should do everything they can to spread that term. It's too good to pass up.
  - w0rd-driven 13y ago
    Unless you lived right by, and I mean next door, to the refurb place I believe in Texas, it was never a few days. A few weeks maybe. I've had a Xbox 360 since launch go through 2 rrod's (so not really the same console) and at best it was 2 weeks to Georgia. They handled everything but shipping was never 2/3 day or better either way. I haven't had a return in 2-3 years now so maybe they got soooo good at the end that changed but I never remember it being that quick. MS also finally owned up to and corrected a serious design flaw. I don't expect the same from Sony just yet. You'll at least get them looking at it in the same manner initially. It behooves everyone for them to check it out and refurbish first, then just replace as they determine the root cause.
    - mitchty 13y ago
      I must not play my 360 enough but I have one of the originalish white 360's bought at the same time as others (not day one, but before any of the fixes) and never had a RROD. But now that I say that online watch it die the next time I turn it on. Glad I never had to send it in because Minnesota is a skosh farther than Georgia.
    - jedrek 13y ago
      I live in Poland and had a white one RROD after about 11 months. Everybody told me: it'll take weeks. So I sent it in and went out and got myself one of the slim ones. Five or six days after a courier came to pick it up, another one came to drop it off. It'd go to Germany, been fixed and sent back to the Poland in under a week.
      - w0rd-driven 13y ago
        I forgot about that point. At some stage they would send you a refurb as you likely "proved" you sent yours in. They knew they would replace it so sometimes it would come back stupid quick. In all but the last of mine, I got the same unit back which likely accounts for the delays. They, and I as well, likely preferred letting us keep the same unit for warranty, live, etc purposes as the "move my stuff to a new Xbox" wasn't terribly fun to do, much less any more than once.
- tetha 13y ago
  It is imperative to get the playstations working, simply from a buisness view. Game publishers want to position their releases into the hype around the newly released PS4. If an unknown, not really small number of PS4s just doesn't work, two bad things happen: i) these people won't buy those games due to a lack of console and even worse, ii) will probably start talking to their friends - and guess what happens, if someone is on the fence about the new console and his friend is like "Yeah I got my PS4 and it doesn't work". It's not a pretty situation, especially if one starts thinking about reported cases vs real numer of cases.
jlgreco 13y ago
Re: 'Industry standard' error rate. I admittedly haven't worked in manufacturing at anything even resembling that scale, but I did spend a summer working for a company that assembled, sold, and installed PCs to local small businesses and (particularly) school districts. A 4-5% failure rate, at the point of installation, would have been absolutely inconceivable in that job. Sure, there were lots of failures, most caused by assembly errors, some caused by damage during assembly, some due to component failures, but the vast majority were caught before the trucks were loaded. One guy with a rolling swivel chair and several industrial-sized KVM switches can verify that 500 (what you might expect for several computer labs across a single school district, for school districts the size we were dealing with) or so PCs will more or less work in really just a few minutes. I would assert that this sort of manual sanity checking is the sort of operation that is embarrassingly parallelizable too. Two people can check a batch of 1000 just as fast as one person can check 500. 20 people should be able to do 10,000. And this was a small operation. Were we larger, it may have made sense to look into more automation. Between those checks, and when they were hauled into schools and plugged in? Nothing much about a tractor trailer ride is going to make a PC go DOA. So I guess my question is, what sort of QA are they doing at the factory to get a 4-5% DOA rate? Or if the QA is fine, what the hell is happening during the shipping? Are the devices overly fragile? If they are being damaged during shipping, could the same damage occur in the home?
- ajasmin 13y ago
  I don't know much about manufacturing either. But, wouldn't Sony also make sure their units "more or less work" before they leave the factory? I mean, the thing could be working on departure and dead on arrival.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    That possibility is where this section applies: "Or if the QA is fine, what the hell is happening during the shipping? Are the devices overly fragile? If they are being damaged during shipping, could the same damage occur in the home?"
- anonymfus 13y ago
lucisferre 13y ago
You're also assuming everyone with a dead unit bothered to post a review
- bmelton 13y ago
  I'd say that the distribution is likely that most of the people with a dead unit posted reviews, while most of the people who received a working unit have not (and are likely still playing it). People are far more likely to complain than to praise, and a dead unit arriving for a fairly expensive hot commodity is definitely cause for complaint, especially for something people are so passionate about as a PS4. I'd be eager to see how many of those low ratings were due to people who took the day off to play it and couldn't.
kosei 13y ago
Also, no way that 100% of bad orders came in and have a review. The old rubric was that for every vocal complaining customer (forums, reviews, etc) there are 7-10 in the wings not complaining. So I would say that you can't really draw conclusions simply based on the reviews, unless you want to inflate them by an order of magnitude.
Negitivefrags 13y ago
I'm quite surprised you came to that number given this announcement by sony. http://www.cinemablend.com/games/PS4-Failure-Rate-0-4-Says-Sony-60566.html http://www.cinemablend.com/games/PS4-Failure-Rate-0-4-Says-S...
thetrb 13y ago
If it were just the industry standard failure rate then we should have seen a similar pattern of bad reviews for the other recent console launches. I don't know if that happened or not, but I think you're making it a bit too easy just blaming it on the standard failure rate.
philliphaydon 13y ago
Looking at Amazon and the internet, it looks like its FAR more than xbox360 fail rate.
VLM 13y ago
"Presuming ... that 100% of DOA customers posted a 1-star comment" Compare the stats on Dec 24th to Dec 26th, I bet they'll be an interesting change. Christmas is only like 5 weeks away; its not like they released in June or something. A very large fraction of PS4 shipped probably are covered in gift wrapping paper right now. Bonus points if they had the sense to ship a one month warranty five weeks before christmas... it might be bad, but it can't be that bad, or can it?

spaux 13y ago

I'm more upset by the way they are handling it, it looks like they aren't going to replace them, but try to fix them. Anyone who's sent an RROD xbox (I haven't) knows the pain that will come with that. You'll see your PS4 again in a few weeks.

Nerdfest 13y ago
I had the RROD with an XBox and they were _very_ quick getting it back. I think it was a couple of days. It's still an inconvenience, but it was also after more than a year of use. Ctl-Alt-Del is referring to this as the "Pulsing Blue Dick-Punch of Death". I think everyone should do everything they can to spread that term. It's too good to pass up.
- w0rd-driven 13y ago
  Unless you lived right by, and I mean next door, to the refurb place I believe in Texas, it was never a few days. A few weeks maybe. I've had a Xbox 360 since launch go through 2 rrod's (so not really the same console) and at best it was 2 weeks to Georgia. They handled everything but shipping was never 2/3 day or better either way. I haven't had a return in 2-3 years now so maybe they got soooo good at the end that changed but I never remember it being that quick. MS also finally owned up to and corrected a serious design flaw. I don't expect the same from Sony just yet. You'll at least get them looking at it in the same manner initially. It behooves everyone for them to check it out and refurbish first, then just replace as they determine the root cause.
  - mitchty 13y ago
    I must not play my 360 enough but I have one of the originalish white 360's bought at the same time as others (not day one, but before any of the fixes) and never had a RROD. But now that I say that online watch it die the next time I turn it on. Glad I never had to send it in because Minnesota is a skosh farther than Georgia.
  - jedrek 13y ago
    I live in Poland and had a white one RROD after about 11 months. Everybody told me: it'll take weeks. So I sent it in and went out and got myself one of the slim ones. Five or six days after a courier came to pick it up, another one came to drop it off. It'd go to Germany, been fixed and sent back to the Poland in under a week.
    - w0rd-driven 13y ago
      I forgot about that point. At some stage they would send you a refurb as you likely "proved" you sent yours in. They knew they would replace it so sometimes it would come back stupid quick. In all but the last of mine, I got the same unit back which likely accounts for the delays. They, and I as well, likely preferred letting us keep the same unit for warranty, live, etc purposes as the "move my stuff to a new Xbox" wasn't terribly fun to do, much less any more than once.
tetha 13y ago
It is imperative to get the playstations working, simply from a buisness view. Game publishers want to position their releases into the hype around the newly released PS4. If an unknown, not really small number of PS4s just doesn't work, two bad things happen: i) these people won't buy those games due to a lack of console and even worse, ii) will probably start talking to their friends - and guess what happens, if someone is on the fence about the new console and his friend is like "Yeah I got my PS4 and it doesn't work". It's not a pretty situation, especially if one starts thinking about reported cases vs real numer of cases.

jlgreco 13y ago

Re: 'Industry standard' error rate. I admittedly haven't worked in manufacturing at anything even resembling that scale, but I did spend a summer working for a company that assembled, sold, and installed PCs to local small businesses and (particularly) school districts. A 4-5% failure rate, at the point of installation, would have been absolutely inconceivable in that job. Sure, there were lots of failures, most caused by assembly errors, some caused by damage during assembly, some due to component failures, but the vast majority were caught before the trucks were loaded. One guy with a rolling swivel chair and several industrial-sized KVM switches can verify that 500 (what you might expect for several computer labs across a single school district, for school districts the size we were dealing with) or so PCs will more or less work in really just a few minutes. I would assert that this sort of manual sanity checking is the sort of operation that is embarrassingly parallelizable too. Two people can check a batch of 1000 just as fast as one person can check 500. 20 people should be able to do 10,000. And this was a small operation. Were we larger, it may have made sense to look into more automation. Between those checks, and when they were hauled into schools and plugged in? Nothing much about a tractor trailer ride is going to make a PC go DOA. So I guess my question is, what sort of QA are they doing at the factory to get a 4-5% DOA rate? Or if the QA is fine, what the hell is happening during the shipping? Are the devices overly fragile? If they are being damaged during shipping, could the same damage occur in the home?

ajasmin 13y ago
I don't know much about manufacturing either. But, wouldn't Sony also make sure their units "more or less work" before they leave the factory? I mean, the thing could be working on departure and dead on arrival.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  That possibility is where this section applies: "Or if the QA is fine, what the hell is happening during the shipping? Are the devices overly fragile? If they are being damaged during shipping, could the same damage occur in the home?"
anonymfus 13y ago

lucisferre 13y ago

You're also assuming everyone with a dead unit bothered to post a review

bmelton 13y ago
I'd say that the distribution is likely that most of the people with a dead unit posted reviews, while most of the people who received a working unit have not (and are likely still playing it). People are far more likely to complain than to praise, and a dead unit arriving for a fairly expensive hot commodity is definitely cause for complaint, especially for something people are so passionate about as a PS4. I'd be eager to see how many of those low ratings were due to people who took the day off to play it and couldn't.

kosei 13y ago

Also, no way that 100% of bad orders came in and have a review. The old rubric was that for every vocal complaining customer (forums, reviews, etc) there are 7-10 in the wings not complaining. So I would say that you can't really draw conclusions simply based on the reviews, unless you want to inflate them by an order of magnitude.

Negitivefrags 13y ago

I'm quite surprised you came to that number given this announcement by sony. http://www.cinemablend.com/games/PS4-Failure-Rate-0-4-Says-Sony-60566.html http://www.cinemablend.com/games/PS4-Failure-Rate-0-4-Says-S...

thetrb 13y ago

If it were just the industry standard failure rate then we should have seen a similar pattern of bad reviews for the other recent console launches. I don't know if that happened or not, but I think you're making it a bit too easy just blaming it on the standard failure rate.

philliphaydon 13y ago

Looking at Amazon and the internet, it looks like its FAR more than xbox360 fail rate.

VLM 13y ago

"Presuming ... that 100% of DOA customers posted a 1-star comment" Compare the stats on Dec 24th to Dec 26th, I bet they'll be an interesting change. Christmas is only like 5 weeks away; its not like they released in June or something. A very large fraction of PS4 shipped probably are covered in gift wrapping paper right now. Bonus points if they had the sense to ship a one month warranty five weeks before christmas... it might be bad, but it can't be that bad, or can it?