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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

I read a comment earlier that made a good point that unlike the console launches of the previous generation in 2004-2006, we now have access to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to vocalize and demonstrate our complaints worldwide.

It makes the vocal minority much more vocal.

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As I recall, RROD complaints were quite strident after the Xbox 360 came out, on blogs, gaming sites, comment sections of news articles, and the early social sites (Facebook was big among the college crowd at that time, and Friendster, MySpace, Friendfeed, etc. were active discussion areas as well). Most gamers were aware of the issue. Microsoft's return policy and eventual fixes helped change public perception.

You make it sound as if user-submitted content didn't exist before 2006. There were still forums at that time. Gamespot, IGN, and GameFAQs all had forums. NeoGAF existed, as did Joystiq, Kotaku, and 1UP, and they were all just as news-savvy as they are today.

A lot of things have changed since 2006, there's no denying it, but the gaming industry has always been ahead of the curve, and the social circles are much the same today as they have been for the last fifteen years.

If you clicked on the link above, you will see that nearly 40% of the Amazon reviews are 1*. There is a good chance that most of those people received a dead PS4. Agree that not everybody who received a good PS4 left a positive review but this certainly does not make it looks like a minority.

We know that at least 323 received a broken PS4. At least 492 received a working PS4.

I would guess that 1/10 would write a review when the PS4 is broken and 1/1000 would write a review regardless.

Also we don't know if these are real reviews or just 323 Microsoft employees who were given money to order the PS4 and then post a bad review :P

Definitely reaching there - you can't assume a large majority of people who ordered from Amazon are leaving reviews. You already know that people without a working console will no doubt go leave a review, so the sample is significantly skewed.

We won't know if this is a real problem until Sony says something.

Disclosure: I ordered my PS4 from Amazon in June, received it yesterday, it works fine...and I have no reason to write a review about it.

Also, it looks - at a glance - like more of the 5* reviews are from verified purchasers than the 1* reviews. Presumably a bunch of people who didn't buy from Amazon and had a DOA PS4 went onto Amazon and posted an angry review, but people who got a working one had no reason to.

The people who received working PS4s are playing them.

There are also other possible reasons for negative reviews. For many people who used only Xbox before just look of interface of PS could be a shock.

If after using only xbox, you bought and received a PS4 from Amazon, would you leave a 1 star ranking because of the interface look? 3-stars, maybe; 2-stars, maybe; but if you put 1* on the first day after paying hundreds of dollars, then it means that you had some serious unexpected, unwelcome surprise.

Those of us who got a console in good condition most likely don't post. I got a launch console from Amazon & even applied the update, and it worked like a charm. I've no complaints so far (minus the horrid launch lineup).

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