They were never headline news, but Sony did a pretty good job throughout the PlayStation 4's lifespan of releasing custom consoles. You know the drill: it’s a regular PlayStation 4 inside, but the case would be a new colour, or there’d be a fancy faceplate with a game’s logo or piece of art on it.
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Aside from swappable coloured panels Sony hasn’t really seemed to be as interested in the idea on the PlayStation 5, which makes the announcement of this new Lebron James-themed console super weird.
For starters, it’s not even a PlayStation video game. Or a video game at all. It’s a console tied to Lebron James the man, who is synonymous with a lot of things, none of them being video games.
And secondly, it looks like shit! It looks like a LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE stencil you’d find on the kitchen wall of your friend’s mum’s place. It looks like the box art for a set of coloured markers for toddlers. And who else other than a Nike marketing executive would even recognise any of this as having anything to do with Lebron?
Most people walking into a house and seeing this would be like “why did you buy a PlayStation 5 case on Etsy?” To which the owner would then have to explain, Oh, this is a Lebron James PS5, which the NBA’s all-time scoring leader himself describes as:
OK, I feel slightly bad now, because so that’s real nice for the kids at I Promise, a school funded by the NBA megastar’s foundation, and located in James’ hometown of Akron.
But only slightly! For everyone else this still looks bad. And may just be a taste of what’s to come; at the bottom of Sony’s announcement was word that this is just the first release in a whole line of stuff designed with “creators, athletes, actors, artists, gamers, and entertainers”:
