Pokemon Sword and Shield may have finally gotten its way into players’ Switches on Friday, but it also may have made its way into another piece of technology as well. Users have been reporting multiple crashes on their Roku devices for the last few days and, weirdly enough, it’s most likely because of Pokemon Sword and Shield.
People began complaining on the Roku subreddit that their Roku device was stuck in a boot loop and continually crashing. Some thought that Roku had pushed out an update that bricked their system, but that was not the case. Eventually, the users began to realize that they almost all had one thing in common with their frozen Rokus: Pokemon Sword and Shield.
ALSO: The smaller Pokemon Sword and Shield Pokedex isn’t all bad news
These users began noticing that their Roku worked as intended once the system was off or in airplane mode, which suspends frequencies from said device. Roku even officially responded in that initial thread, stating that they “are aware of an issue when using Nintendo Switch and the latest Pokémon game impacting a limited number of Roku devices.” They then advised that people turn off their Switches or setting it to airplane mode while also after saying they are “working diligently to resolve this issue.”
But some users were not satisfied and decided to do some tests. Redditor MazInger and their wife decided to analyze how packets were being sent using Wireshark, a piece of software that monitors such a thing. Through these tests, they found that the Switch spams its own “sort of proprietary action” to likely find other nearby users with the game. Given this data, it seems as though Roku is picking up those Pokemon signals and crashing because it doesn’t know what to do with them. Essentially, it sounds like the Switch is shooting out a bunch of its own signals to flag down other Pokemon players and the Roku is somehow picking that signal up and, unsure of how to process them, repeatedly crashing. Others also found that the Switch is trying to pair with the device like a remote.
It’s worth mentioning that this odd Pokemon Roku issue isn’t affecting every device. A handful of people in those threads cited that they were not having problems. But it is affecting enough of them to where it is some sort of problem. One person even revealed that Pokemon Sword and Shield caused his PS4 remote play session to drop frames. Regardless, hopefully it will get resolved soon and people can watch TV and play Game Freak’s newest title.
