A console development kit is the hardware distributed by console manufacturers to game studios so that they can build and test their games. It’s always cause for excitement in the gaming world when development kits for new consoles begin to be sent out. When a photo of an alleged PlayStation 5 dev kit leaked online in late 2019, it was a newsworthy event. And non-developers who manage to obtain a kit have a rare collector’s item on their hands.
Development kits are sold to software companies for prices ranging anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several thousand. With the PlayStation 4, Sony loaned out dev kits to indie studios who otherwise might not have been able to afford the initial investment, and these were supposed to be returned to Sony after one year. However, in 2016, a PS4 development kit loaned to defunct studio United Front Games ended up selling in a bankruptcy auction. According to some reports, a Sony employee was put to work recovering the auctioned dev kit.
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For a few hours this morning, two PlayStation 5 development kits appeared for sale on eBay. Being sold as a pair along with two black DualSense controllers, the auction for the DFI-D1000AA dev kit and DFI-T1000AA test kit received 12 bids and reached €2,850, approximately $3,373, before eBay pulled the listing. It’s unclear why the auction was removed, since the seller may have legitimately purchased the dev kit from Sony, but the console manufacturer might have requested it. A PS5 development kit being sold less than a year after the console’s launch is probably neither an ideal nor legal situation due to NDAs.
For a non-developer, purchasing a console development kit is primarily for the novelty, because the user license expires after a set period of time and must be renewed regularly by the developer to access any files on the hardware. Likewise, most dev kits cannot play retail versions of games. In fact, in 2014, Microsoft launched its ID@Xbox initiative that allowed indie developers to convert a retail Xbox One into a development kit. However, non-developers were warned away from fiddling with the options in the “Developer Settings” menu because doing so could render the console entirely unusable.
Console development kits being distributed to game studios is a thrilling time for the gaming community because it signals that a new generation of consoles is close at hand. The dev kit also provides insight into the potential technical prowess of the retail version of the game console. And because images of the development kit inevitably leak online, the kits rarely resemble the finished product and therefore provide a unique showpiece for collectors.