This new generation of gaming hardware has been relatively free of major technical issues, thankfully. There was some initial worry over the PS4 when it launched due to several reports of gamers' consoles failing, but those proved to be a pretty small percentage of total units. There was nothing on the scale of the Xbox 360's Red Ring of Death failure epidemic, but people still have experienced some issues.
A report counted and detailed the most popular issues across all three new consoles that people have sought help for. The report comes from troubleshooting service Fixya, which combed through over 40,000 help requests on its site to produce this information. The Wii U, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 have some problems in common, but a few unique ones as well.
The most common issue across all three platforms is either freezing or turning off, two sides of the same frustrating issue. 35% of Wii U and 20% of PS4 users needed help for freezing problems, which was not an issue on Xbox One. However, 25% of Xbox One searches were for "console turning off", with the same issue responsible for 35% of PS4 help requests.
Between the two issues, Sony's console has been plagued by the highest combined percentage of both, but we haven't heard much about that being too widespread of an issue. It's not that 35% of PS4 owners are having problems with the console turning off, remember, just that of the people having problems with their console, 35% of those issues were related to PS4 consoles shutting down. The total number of cases of that issue is still likely a small percentage of all PS4 consoles.
The Wii U and Xbox One have their own unique problems, with the largest percentage of Xbox One issues relating to the Kinect. People are either having hardware malfunctions or are unable to operate the motion-tracking peripheral. 30% of Wii U owners requested help with the console's game pad.
Other issues across the consoles included audio and video problems, as well as disc drive trouble. Check out the full report for all the numbers, and suggested solutions to each problem.
