Enthusiast buys $2,500 PS5 dev kit that can't run a single game
The most coveted consoles in collections often never hit store shelves. People pay thousands of dollars for a huge V-shaped box that won't even run its main menu without Sony's permission.
One collector showed off the purchase on Reddit. His collection already included eight dev kits ranging from the PS1 to the PS4 Pro, and now a PlayStation 5 dev kit has joined them, bought from another collector for $2,500. The silhouette looks familiar to many. Photos of the device with a V-shaped cutout, clearly hinting at the Roman numeral five, leaked back in fall 2019, and before the console was revealed in June 2020, plenty of gamers were convinced the PS5 would look exactly like this.
The design got roasted at the time and picked up the nickname "pizza oven," though the retail PS5 with its white "wings" soon earned an equally unflattering comparison to a Wi-Fi router.
The hardware inside the dev kit is close to the retail console, but it packs twice the memory, 32 GB versus 16 GB, and a 2.5 TB drive. The extra headroom is there because debug builds are noticeably heavier than final ones, and studios tend to optimize closer to the end of development.
Developers in the thread listed what a dev kit offers:
running a game straight from the engine or Visual Studio with a debugger and breakpoints attached
analyzing crashes with the exact spot in the code where something broke
capturing individual GPU frames and profiling to find bottlenecks and excess memory usage
access to Sony platform APIs, including test store purchases with fake credit card numbers
In the early days, dev kits are surrounded by real secrecy. A developer who worked with PS5 hardware about two years before launch said the units were kept in cabinets in the areas of teams that had signed NDAs, so that outside employees couldn't even see them.
Studios also receive test kits, which are closer to the retail console and designed for QA. Sony and Microsoft handle NDAs online, while Nintendo gathers the necessary people in one place, gives an hour-long presentation, and has everyone sign paperwork in person. Silence about Switch 2 had to be kept even after the console launched.
Outside a studio, such a kit loses almost all of its purpose. One former developer put it bluntly:
this is a giant paperweight at the hands of someone outside of the studio.
After the Xbox 360 and PS3 dev kit hacks, Sony keeps tight control over these units. Studios lease them in batches, and on boot the console contacts the company servers, works only from a whitelist of IP addresses, and regularly demands reactivation through a Sony DevNet account.
The activation on the collector's unit expired long ago, and connecting a device of unclear origin to the internet without a good reason is risky, since it may well be listed as missing.
