Rumor: Pokemon Sword and Shield is Causing Consoles to Break

There are a lot of legitimate reasons to dislike Pokemon Sword and Shield. Given how much money it could potentially make the company and the importance of the title itself, almost every sign points to the title being rushed out to meet deadlines and/or it coasting on the franchises name by not including a number of Pokemon. However, it has hit the point where almost every issue, both fake and potentially real, are blamed on the two games.

At launch there were reports of Pokemon Sword and Shield forcing players to format their memory card. This issue had a number of fingers pointing a wide variety of directions from the games to an issue with modded consoles, to something related to the exFAT file format. Then there were a myriad of review bombings for all kinds of issues, shortcomings and more that take the legitimate issues to the next level. Thankfully, now it seems the title is being associated with destroying systems.

https://twitter.com/TinTin_Zou/status/1196503135675486208

One user reported getting a blue screen after playing and since then a Pastebin was created to document this and other errors. Since then some people have tried to figure out why this is happening, suggesting Pokemon is using the NAND as virtual memory and eventually this will cause the device to crash. While scary if true, SciresM, the person who managed to hack those games to get Omastar, suggests this makes no sense.

There are like a million reasons why this is stupid, but I guess the most obvious one is that the kind og access to the NAND that post is talking about would require significant privileges. Sword/Shield are games, and have pretty much no interesting OS-level privileges. If they try to reach out to access the console’s NAND, the FS system module will reject them with “Permission Denied.”

SciresM

While it’s still possible there is something else going on, for now it seems like this is just another rumor that might simply be the result of Pokemon being a bit more demanding of a game.