Footage of PS4 freezing, apparently after heating up while running, has popped up online. The video comes from a French outlet called Gamekyo on livestream, while they are demonstrating the game Knack.
It is a brief minute and a half video, showing two presenters talking while a cutscene from the game plays out. At this point, the system is offscreen, and has apparently been opened up. One presenter notices that the system is emitting heat and places his hands near it, and the other does the same and concurs. They talk to a Sony person offscreen, and then go on a few more seconds like nothing happened.
And then, close to the middle of it, the game starts freezing. One presenter takes a long glance at the system, and then glances to the screen. The game starts moving again, but the framerate dips completely. They try to go home, and then enter back in, but this does not fix the problem. Finally, they leave the game completely and reenter, and this is where the clip ends.
A few days ago, when the Red Line of Death issue 1st came up, Shuhei Yoshida was asked about it and he curtly replied it was not true.
@JoshEldridge016 not true
— Shuhei Yoshida (@yosp) October 15, 2013
Unfortunately, the phrasing of the question and the answer was such that the issue wasn’t really completely addressed. While it’s become clear that the Playstation 4’s red light is not some Red Line of Death, it was an incident where the system overheated, and now we're seeing a similar incident caught on video.
Even if we accept that this is a demo unit, and there may be bugs in the game being used to demo it, we are still seeing overheating going on. Sony needs to address this as a legitimate concern and give an explanation on what has been happening on these demos, lest a PR disaster catches up to them right before the system's launch.
UPDATE: Gamekyo's Twitter account responded to concerns raised by this video. We're embedding the tweets for you to read verbatim below.
@elkewedi The PS4 was actually placed in a box under the TV. There was heat going out from the box, but the PS4 seemed to be OK.
— Gamekyo : blogs (@gamekyoblog) October 17, 2013
@elkewedi the PS4 seems to have a good ventilation system, the environment becomes very hot though if it's in a closed box.
— Gamekyo : blogs (@gamekyoblog) October 17, 2013
