Earlier has year I was lucky enough to get a Playstation 5 from the Walmart website and it’s been nothing but trouble ever since. Up until now, I’ve been very lucky with launch consoles and never had a problem. That all changed and the unit has been in for repair, twice now with varying results.

Consoles for me are supposed to relieve stress but the Playstation 5 just adds to it. Given that I’ve yet to see a PS5 exclusive game that’s worthwhile to me I may just sell it and go back to my Playstation 4 Pro.

Note that if you have already gone through all the steps on the Playstation website, chatting with support is not worth your time. They only know how to do what is on that page and cannot do anything further. No logs for developers, no second tier of support, nothing.

Issue #01: Network issues with Playstation Now and the Playstation Store

The first issue was that I paid for Playstation Now (I’ve since canceled it as it’s not worth the money) and frequently the screen would give me blank boxes instead of the games and refuse to load anything. The networking on the device was otherwise fine. They replaced the mainboard and sent it back only for the issue to be the same as before.

Before anyone says anything, I have gone through their support documents a dozen times. I have all the ports for it open on my router so that is not the issue.

Issue #02: Unit hard powers off while in rest mode

This issue is a lot more serious as it can result in “bricking” the console or the loss of all data on the console. If you take a look through Twitter and Reddit this is a rather common problem, but not universal. When the unit is in rest mode it will hard power off at random intervals. This can happen after a single day, three days, and even five days but for me, it always eventually happens.

I live in an old building so I was worried there was something up with the power. So I bought a nice UPS to plug the unit into and that ultimately changed nothing. I followed some other tips, I removed my m2.SSD and anything connected to the unit. Again, no change.

To me, this means the unit is broken so I sent it back in again as that’s the only way there going to pay any attention to the issue. Not entirely unexpectantly they sent it back saying the unit was fine, which means they didn’t check or left it on long enough for the issue to happen. Or they are aware of the issue and simply have no fix for it. I highly recommend that if you have an issue, complain and send the unit in. It took an awful lot of people yelling before Microsoft for example admitted to the Xbox 360 issues.

Conclusion

This to me is unacceptable. Yes, I can get by if I decide to keep it by powering it off and back on again after every use, but I shouldn’t have to do that. If you have this issue, or any severe issue with your console do not just “work around it” and complain, send the unit in. Make as much noise as possible. It’s the only way they listen.