Could we be reading the plot to what is possibly the lamest James Bond film in existence? Or could Sony be the victim of some rather serious sabotage? According to a posting on the Xi’an Institute of Technology forum, it’s the latter – with student interns reportedly forced to build Sony’s PlayStation 4 along with some ill treatment and a side of sabotage.
Sony typically builds its PlayStation consoles in Japan, but with such a large amount of PS4s being needed to ship into stores to deal with unprecedented demand, what with one million consoles sold within 24 hours, Sony turned to Foxconn for help – a company most known for building Apple products.
The thread on the forum was translated by one helpful member of the IGN boards, who claims that the post said “Since Foxconn are not treating us well, we will not treat the PS4 console well. The PS4 console we assemble can be turned on at best.”
Whilst these are some bold claims, they look like they’re being backed up by some hardware problems affecting quite a few PlayStation owners – including one dubbed ‘Blue Light of Death’.
The post of the Xi’an Institute of Technology forum has since been removed, so it may have been some elaborate prank, but according to another poster, even if the products were assembled badly – it’s not down to the students, who make up “less than 1/10 of the workers”.
“If the system is broken, don’t blame us students. When we were studying, they shipped in 20,000 migrant workers from Guizhou. On top of that, there were also many Yantai local students and long-time Foxconn workers at the factories. The people that made the news were us Xi’an Technological University North Institute students. We’re not even 1/10 of the workers at Foxconn. So don’t blame the issue on us Chinese students, and don’t talk about Foxconn on this board. You have no idea how hard it was to work in the factories as a recent high school graduate. Feel free to ask questions about the PS4 but not about Foxconn. Those with dirty mouths aren’t welcome. If you have a problem, go find quality control. We were only in charge of manufacturing. :)”
If the sabotage is proven to be correct, it may not just be Sony who has some problems to deal with in the future, with Nintendo and Microsoft having also outsourced console production to Foxconn.
