PS4 console gets ‘Red Line of Death’ to avoid overheating

Both Microsoft and Sony had their fair share of hardware defects with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.  It’s enough to make gamers worried about these big investments in next-gen hardware.   With the extended gameplay sessions and even longer fits of movie watching and entertainment use, there’s no hiding from the possibility of overheating.

The Red Line of Death was reported from a recent promotional event

While Microsoft has done well to avoid any public overheating issues in the demos of the console,  Sony has seen a couple public console malfunctions, and this might be their first publicly captured sighting of the ‘Red Line of Death’ from Spanish site Elotrolado if this rumored report is true.

Usually lit up in blue, the PS4 was on display in an unventilated plastic case when the blue light turned red.  The forum poster claims that a message showed up on the screen that said the console had a very high temperature.  From the sounds of it, it didn’t mean that the hardware was fried or anything.  According to the report, once the console was given some room to breathe, the error message was gone and the light returned to its normal blue color.

Let’s just hope that Sony and Microsoft have learned from their hardware mistakes that brought us the Red Ring of Death fiasco, and Sony’s more muted Yellow Light of Death issues.  It would be a bitter pill to swallow if these consoles have the issues that their predecessors did.

Since it’s pretty easy to photoshop something like this, we’re gonna chalk it up to rumors at this point.  We’ll find out soon enough however, the PlayStation 4 launches in one month’s time on November 15th.

Update:  When asked whether the PS4 had a ‘Red Light of Death’, Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida said “not true”  via Twitter.