It sounds weird, but it’s true: a cheap, not that important component can be a costly problem if it stops working altogether.

Nowadays, Sony isn’t in the best scenario with the news: we first hear that the PlayStation 3, the PSP, and the PlayStation Vita will see their respective PlayStation Stores go down by the end of the summer, and now, Lance McDonald, a well-known modder, adds fuel to the fire. His tweet reveals that the preservation of the PlayStation 4 isn’t necessarily on stable legs.

In short, the component in question is the internal clock battery in the PlayStation 4. If it dies, you can no longer play games on the console (after getting the CE 34878-0 error message), regardless of it’s digital (via PlayStation Store) or physical, as it relates to how Sony has designed the PS4’s trophy system. Here’s what McDonald wrote: „This error is because trophies on PlayStation 4 require the internal system clock (the one you can’t see/alter) to be correct, so people can’t change their PS4 date/time to make it look like they got trophies earlier than they really did. If your PS4 clock battery dies, all your games die. If your system clock resets to zero, the only official way to correct it is to connect to the PlayStation Network. However, jailbreaking the console allows you to set it manually.

Just to emphasize: you can fix this by just putting a new battery in then syncing your console to the PlayStation Network once. We are just pointing out that the console will be bricked in some imaginary distant future when the PSN goes away (if ever?),” according to McDonald.

This will be a questionable decision in the long-term. If Sony won’t address it, then the console will be nothing more than paperweight in the future. While the NES or the SNES, despite being decades old, are still functioning to this day.

Source: PSL