Cockroaches could be hiding in your game console, waiting to pounce - here's why
What lies at the heart of your PlayStation 4? Processors and memory? Perhaps a Blu-ray copy of "Horizon Zero Dawn"?
Another possibility: It may also full of cockroaches.
This actually makes a lot of sense - the PlayStation 4 is warm when it's running, and its interior is dark and spooky (roaches love warm, dark, spooky places). When gaming site Kotaku visited a third-party game console repair shop in Manhattan recently, it learned of this disgusting phenomenon in a particularly dark way:
"I heard about the PS4's roach problem at an independent console repair shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. XCubicle is a clean and well-kept business where locals drop off their broken consoles to get diagnosed and repaired. Its co-founder, Patrick Che, was listing the types of repair issues he encounters on a day-to-day basis: coins inside disc drives, 3DS mods gone wrong. That's when he pointed to the 'roach bags,' black garbage bags heaped up in the corner of the room."
Whoa.
Those "roach bags," it turns out, were full because roaches see game consoles as convenient roach motels. The PlayStation 4 is a common accommodation because of its design (larger vents), and because it's the most popular game console currently available. Also, notably, Sony won't repair your bug-infested PlayStation 4:
Indeed! So what does that leave you to do? There's really one option: Contact a third-party repair store like the one above, and then have those folks deal with the nightmarish box full of bugs you've brought them. And, in fairness, most people with broken consoles aren't even aware that roaches were the cause.
"Roaches leave traces," Matt Zieminski of hardware repair site iFixit told Kotaku. "Their poop color is distinct and has a certain smell to it. We kind of know right off the bat if there are poop stains on the vent of the fan-we assume it's bug-loaded."
Well, that's horrifying!
Anyway, if you've got a broken game console and don't know the reason, you might have bugs. And if you're looking to avoid this ridiculously gross situation, we'd suggest living in a Howard Hughes-esque germ-less environment. Or just, ya know, keeping your home relatively clean.