PlayStation 4 Tops One Million Units in First Day | Hacker News Reader

PlayStation 4 Tops One Million Units in First Day

blogs.wsj.com

62 pointsanigbrowl60 comments

Very impressive. I have one but I haven't opened it yet. For me, none of the launch titles were particularly compelling. But I missed out on a lot of console games last gen because of the transactional inertia of not owning a system to play them on. Super stoked for Deep Down and The Division, when they come out.

Given the Amazon comments I suggest you open it and power it on to verify it works while it is still in the 'no-questions-asked' warranty period :-). My neighbor's second one has been working fine for a while now.

Regardless of comments, I would recommend everyone test whatever electronics they buy as soon as possible. The reported failure rate on the PS4 is sadly not all that bad.

HP in the early 2000's paid Best Buy to setup (really turn on an test - pre-Geek Squad days) their computers before customers took them home. The failure rate was interesting.

Fascinating, I had not heard that story about HP and Best buy. When building servers I found that powering on the parts and running them at 75% capacity for 72 hrs prior to releasing them to manufacturing helped trim the infant mortality rate to something much more tolerable. DIMMs and Disk Drives were particularly susceptible, power supplies were actually not too bad.

HP had some problems at the time. They shipped an AMD powered PC that would reboot due to low power every time you tried to burn a CD. They also would reuse hard drives off units that were returned. My brother had some words with the HP rep due to what was on a machine he was setting up for a customer.

HP servers seem ok, but their PCs were junk. Such a shame given the heritage.

That's crazy. They were aware of the problem and willing to take steps to fix it, but why not fix it at the source? You'd think that it would be better to test everything at the factory rather than trying to shoehorn it in at the store.

Not if their corporate deals were different in a way that made bulk testing at the factory more expensive than paying Best Buy to do it for the consumer market...

I will certainly do that.

I'm surprised you would have chosen a PS4 over a PS3. The PS4 is not backwards compatible and the PS3 has a large assortment of console exclusives as well as being significantly cheaper (and DLNA media streaming if you are into that). There are some intriguing Black Friday sales coming up on the PS3 and they are still releasing exclusive games.

I honestly have no interest in a PS4 at this time. I have a PS3 and looking forward to some games coming out still (and have a huge backlog), but I also want a Wii U (and I will get one contributing to even a bigger backlog).

With the PS4 selling faster than the initial PS3, I would expect it to quickly gather steam with developers. Life is way too short to cling to older technologies.

"The company has said it expects to sell five million units by March, which would beat the initial sales rollout of its last-generation videogame device, the PlayStation 3, which sold 3.5 million units worldwide over the same introductory period."

The PS4 exclusive titles don't look all that much better than PS3 titles, honestly. Knack is more of a mediocre beat-em-up than a platformer, and Killzone is a blurry mess.

Coming from an Xbox 360, I've got to say that the user experience on the PS4 is a mess. I put a game into the system, and I can play within a minute, but it is a pared down version of the game while it installs. Then I have to exit the game to install it. Oh, and if I want online multiplayer, I usually have to download a 700MB patch before that is available. If I access a TV app through my library, it will boot me back out to the main screen if I have a game running, but if I access it through the TV apps section, it will close my game and allow me to run Netflix.

> I put a game into the system, and I can play within a minute, but it is a pared down version of the game while it installs

With respect, what did you expect? To be able to play the full game before it is installed?

> Oh, and if I want online multiplayer, I usually have to download a 700MB patch

Oh, the horror. I am guessing that could take as long as 10 minutes!

Talk about your first world problems....

I can play my Xbox360 / PS3 games just fine without installing them. So a 'next-gen' console has a worse experience in that regard.

The excitement of a new toy is significantly reduced when you have to wait a couple of hours to patch it or install a game etc. I hate people that excuse mediocrity with "first world problems". Instead how about we look at ways of improving things.

Hah, with my copper line fast degrading, the 700MB patch could take quite a while.

"User experience" is often a first-world problem.

From the Xbox 360 to the Dreamcast to the PS2 to the PSX to the SNES to the NES to the Atari 2600, all the games required that I simply place the game into the console and the system would run the game. Now we have this odd kludge that used to be reserved only for PCs. The other features are certainly nice to have, but the PS4 bills itself as a gaming console first, and there is a degraded experience in that regard.

> used to be reserved only for PCs

Used to be something only PCs were capable of doing.

how!!? Now we finally can have games with large environments and high texture resolutions because we aren't limited to the capacity of our discs...

I'm definitely interested in picking up a PS3, now that the PS4 is out. Do you think it'll be cheaper to buy one during Black Friday or to get a used one after Christmas, when a lot of people are (presumably) going to be selling their PS3s because they got a PS4?

I would be surprised if a whole lot of people with PS4s sell their PS3s, as backwards compatibility is literally nill, with merely the possibility that you can stream games over the internet. However, they're cheap now, the game library is exceptional, and I love mine.

Plus Dark Souls 2 is only coming out for ps3/xbox360. I agree Deep Down looks particular awesome; Hopefully it's of Dark Souls caliber.

I also bought a PS3 late in the PS3 cycle. My point is that a lot of the games that came out on PS3 that I would have played, I didn't because at the time I didn't have one.

Even more impressive considering this is only North America.

To put this in contrast, this is the most successful console launch, they sold more in one day than any other consoles have in a month from their launch (from neogaf.com):

http://abload.de/img/screenshot2013-11-17a34cad.png

It's not "in a day". It's all preorders.

That's still one day, all pre-orders are picked up on day 1.

But they have been ordered months in advance.

The funniest thing is that these numbers have been known for months, with probably weekly/daily updates to Sony executives, thanks to ubiquitous pre-order systems.

PS: it's also a single continent, two countries launch. I wonder how well it will fare once it's available worldwide.

I haven't owned a console since buying the Wii but before that my last serious console was a Nintendo 64. I am seriously considering buying one of these bad boys in the new year when I have recovered from the Christmas savings crush. Will be interesting to see how the XBOX One sells in comparison.

So far it appears as though the XBOX One has the better launch titles, the ones for PS4 are very underwhelming.

vs 9 million iphones in the first weekend

iPhone models have a lifespan of 1 year. Game console models have a life span of 6-7 years.

The typical cycle is 2 - 3 years.

Smartphones ARE game consoles.

Um, no, they're not. At least, they're not in terms of their target market. You cannot compare a smart phone to a PS4 or XBox. One is for people who play Candy Crush in their off minutes, the other is for people who play CoD for 12 hours straight. Sure, there is overlap, but this is like comparing a Toyota Tercel to a Ferrari because "they're both cars".

And the typical cycle is not 2-3 years. It has been 6-7 years for the last few generations. Not sure you even play console games...

Now we are into semantics.

They are a threat to traditional game consoles; yes.

They don't have the uniformity-over-time of game consoles, but they do have large distribution.

Snark Mode On:

Right. Let me know how Battlefield 4, Team Fortress, Uncharted, Halo, Call of Duty, et al, are working out for you in a 4 inch screen with touch controls.

Wake me up when your iPhone has almost 2 TFLOPs of computing power and delivers games with 25Gb of graphical content.

Smartphones replace game boys and PS Vitas for casual gamers, they don't replace console and desktop PC gaming by a long shot.

But yeah, Candy Crush Saga and Angry Birds run great.

When was the last time 100,000 people tuned in on Twitch.tv for someone to play a mobile game?

Yeah, this isn't the first time I've seen this kind of comparison. I can only assume it is made by people who simply don't know anything about the gaming industry. These are the same people who think that the desktop is doomed.

General tech nerds seem to look at the raw profits of mobile games and assume that console and PC games must surely be dead, without actually looking into the details of the market.

It's not a zero sum game, and it's not an either/or. There's no meaningful segment of the gaming industry that's declining in absolute numbers (most are growing at varying rates), it's just that the industry has been exploding over the past 15+ years, and each segment is now a smaller slice of a much bigger pie.

Not quite 100000, but 1000 people are watching one guy play clash of clans right now on twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Clash%20of%20Clans

Currently 47000 for the final of a Starcraft 2 competition : http://www.twitch.tv/taketv (HomeStory Cup VIII)

Written like a true mobile games ad trafficker!

In the same way a Playstation is a telephone.

Yes, the PS4 is suffering because you need very large pockets to own one.

How in the world is that a valid comparison? Are you under the impression that the high end console market is as big as the high end cell phone market?

It's actually not about the hardware. It's about the games, movies, music and series.

Sony is not aiming just for the 'console' market.

They are in fact aiming for the console market. Hell, the PS4 doesn't even play MP3's and has no appreciable network media sharing features. If you compare the PS4 to the last iteration it is obvious that they have backpedaled from the media center mentality.

They haven't so much back-pedaled as prioritized gaming above media functionality for launch. All those missing features will come in future updates.

Yeah, I know they'll be patching some things in, but those features were not emphasized at all during the marketing blitz. It has been all about gaming.

They were trying to push Bluray as a media format when the PS3 was released, having the PS3 act as a media center meant more people would buy Bluray movies.

This time, HD-DVD is dead, and everything in your living room already plays streaming media, so it's not much of a selling point.

vs 187123 oranges per day

Yeah, I got the latest Orange, the games on it were the pits!

The poultry industry sells 19 million chickens each day every day, each year every year, in the US alone.

It's good to be on top of the food chain, but on an emotional level when I think of how our species has applied industrial production techniques to other living creatures I can't help feeling a little sad. Now what's for dinner ?

I totally agree, but that part of my brain is unable to overcome the fact that they are delicious.

Iphone games cost how much? A dollar? 5 dollars? 10? Console games start around $60 and people willingly pay for DLC and services that are far more expensive than most iphone content.

The biggest entertainment launch in history, in terms of revenue, was GTA V, a console video game which brought in nearly a billion dollars in one weekend.

and only 500k are still functional...

http://www.amazon.com/PlayStation-4-Launch-Edition/product-r...

your type of reasoning is the one that makes hard working people go mad. Someone works hard on something and it happens to have 0.5% failure rate but you negative people see only that. You know why there are only 1000 5 stars? because all the other people that have working consoles prefer to play instead of leave reviews...

This is really why we can't have nice things...

Also known as the vocal minority.

You have to take in mind not all 1 star reviews are about it being broken. e.g http://www.amazon.com/review/REWFZYCPTU449/ref=cm_cr_pr_cmt?...

Not sure your math is very sound.

Even assuming 5* == working, 1* != working, there's ~1k to .5k respectively as I write this, so a third would be broken and 666k still functional.

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