This One Leaked PS5 Slim Detail Has Gamers Up In Arms
As you may have heard, in October, Sony announced that after three years on the market, the PlayStation 5 would be getting the standard "slim" makeover in November. This puts it roughly on pace in the console life cycle as when the slim model of PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 consoles came out and slightly ahead of the PlayStation 2, which came out past the four-year mark. At the time of the announcement, the focus was on a few things:
- The built-in solid-state drive (SSD) is being upped from 825GB to 1TB.
- Surprisingly, Sony's less expensive PlayStation 5 Digital Edition without an optical disc drive is getting a $50 price increase to $449.99.
- Owners of the PlayStation 5 (Slim) Digital Edition can buy an optional attachable version of the optical drive for $79.99.
Thanks to the price increase on the Digital Edition, the immediate effect of the announcement was that the few online stores that had the original in stock, like Sony Direct and GameStop, quickly sold out. That was about it until @charlieINTEL and @Zuby_Tech posted photos of the slim model packaging on X, the app formerly known as Twitter.
There's a catch to adding a disc drive post-purchase
In scrutinizing the photos, X user @Thunder_clart noticed something curious in the fine print. "Internet connection required to pair Disc Drive and PS5 console upon setup," reads the disclaimer on the box. Yes, being able to use the add-on optical disc drive will, at least at the time of setup, require an internet connection. Since authentication servers could go down at any time, this caused consternation among video game preservationists.
A December 2020 Wired.com article seemingly explains why this is happening, albeit in the context of repairing broken drives on the original Disc Edition. "The root of the problem is that Microsoft and Sony lock down the software they use to pair their disc readers with their consoles' motherboards," wrote iFixit's Kyle Wiens in the article. "Shops like Replay'd could easily replace those drives by accessing the software pairing the drives with the boards. Instead, the repair industry is cowering in fear of a relatively obscure provision of copyright law banning the removal of digital locks that's kept everyone from gamers to farmers and hospitals from fixing the devices they own."
To wit, Wiens explained how, during iFixit's teardown of the PlayStation 5, they tried swapping the optical drives of two Disc Edition consoles that they had. Attempting to load a disc-based copy of "Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales" on both swapped consoles resulted in an error message that said the game "isn't supported by the PS5." This was rectified by switching the drives back to the consoles they shipped in. In other words, it looks like installing a new optical drive requires an internet connection to create the software handshake that allows a stock PlayStation 5 optical drive to work properly.