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PlayStation appears to have fixed PS4's clock battery issue via last week's update, meaning the console will no longer render all games unplayable once the battery dies.
A discovery by Twitter account Does It Play earlier this year revealed that PS4s are effectively ticking time bombs. Don't worry, your console isn't going to explode once its clock reaches zero. Instead, its clock battery will die and if PlayStation has decided to shut down the PS4's servers by that time, which is likely as clock batteries tend to have a very long lifespan, then games, digital and physical, would become unplayable.
As the story gained traction and PS4 owners began to worry, even though issues surrounding dead clock batteries won't arise for a very long time, Sony apparently assured some that the problem was being dealt with. It appears Sony was telling the truth as testing of the PS4's latest update seems to prove that the clock battery problem is no more.
YouTuber Destruction Games was one of the first to highlight that dead clock battery or not, physical games are playabale on PS4. “Tested it on my PS4 with a dead battery and games are no longer crashing on startup and I can even earn trophies,” Destruction Games tweeted. Trophies and their timestamps appeared to be the reason why PS4s need an internet connection to communicate with the console's clock battery so the dates and times they were earned can't be falsified.
Destruction Games shows that when trophies are earned with a dead clock battery, they simply don't have a date and time attached at all. While they didn't try a digital game out for themselves, others have confirmed that the 9.0 update also allows for digital downloads to be played without issue on a PS4 with a dead clock battery.
Although the PS5 continues to go from strength to strength, building a strong present and future for Sony, PlayStation has been criticized for trying to leave behind its past in 2021. Not only through the clock battery issue, but also its attempts to close its PS3 and PS Vita online stores. That decision was met with such backlash that it was quickly reversed.